Heh, I know of one time the kernel did break backward-compatibility, intentionally even - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6b99e3569ba17b9fd38514d66591a

Heh, I know of one time the kernel did break backward-compatibility, intentionally even - https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6b99e3569ba17b9fd38514d66591ae728b778e3b https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/6b99e3569ba17b9fd38... My fan controller used the sysfs paths mentioned in the commit message directly. So while the commit is probably correct that users of the lm-sensors library would not be affected, my application was. It was relatively easy to fix since I was the only user of the application, so I didn't care about being compatible with older kernels.