On Jul 23, 2008, Nifty Fedora Mitch <niftyfedora@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > systematic interface between the kernel services and the applications. > This interface consists of an API and and ABI. Not really. It's just an ABI, really. It's GNU libc's job to offer an API for applications and translate that into the system calls defined in the kernel ABI. There's no such thing as a kernel header file you can include from userland and start issuing calls into the kernel. Kernel developers will tell you that including kernel headers from userland is not kosher. Of course GNU libc has its own ABI as well, and that's what applications for GNU/Linux are compatible with, after being built using the GNU libc API. As for the kernel ABI, nothing but GNU libc really cares about it, since pretty much nobody else issues syscalls directly. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org} FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
