4 ms·

In Linux’s defense, the userland abi is stable, which is no small feat in terms of absorbing pain in order to benefit their many users.. Not sure why the trade

• musicale 1y ago
  > userland abi is stable The system call interface per se is relatively stable. Then there's all that stuff that has been dumped into /proc...
• DSMan195276 1y ago
  Well from a certain POV it's like stabilizing APIs internal to your application - nobody else should be calling them so "stabilizing" them just creates unnecessary maintenance work. Obviously in practice certain things like eBPF or externally-maintained drivers can break this model, but then they don't really want people doing those things vs. merging code into the kernel.
• alexjplant 1y ago
  > In Linux’s defense, the userland abi is stable, which is no small feat in terms of absorbing pain in order to benefit their many users.. I understand that technically eBPF programs run on a VM in kernel space but aren't they loaded from userspace? Isn't eBPF an alternative to developing kernel modules and in-tree drivers? To a layperson like me it walks, talks, and quacks like userspace much more than the kernel. The fact that struct layout can change at the whim of kernel developers seems counterproductive. I guess this is what CO-RE is supposed to solve but having to deal with a bunch of pointer and sizeof() chicanery seems archaic (coming from a total luser/kernel nublet that hasn't written C in over a decade).