You are correct. A good but perhaps small example which bit me this week is inotify; I could not build this tool https://github.com/mikesart/inotify-info http

You are correct. A good but perhaps small example which bit me this week is inotify; I could not build this tool https://github.com/mikesart/inotify-info https://github.com/mikesart/inotify-info on CentOS 7 (at work) because it's only on version 3.x of the kernel and is missing the statx(2) system call which was added in 4.11. The rate of change may be slow, but the kernel is a huge thing, so it's not entirely surprising these situations arise.