Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 30 Nov 2004 07:51:37 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: [RFC] Splitting kernel headers and deprecating __KERNEL__ |
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On Tue, 30 Nov 2004, David Howells wrote: > > > But in general, I do kind of like the explicit marking. The same way we > > explicitly mark the functions inside the kernel that we expose to modules, > > we could try to mark the data structures and values that we expose to user > > space. That tends to "work". > > That gets trickier when it comes to #defines, I think. > > Do you really object that much to splitting the header files as I proposed?
I object sternuously to your "the header files". If you can't even say _which_ header file, I'm not interested.
If you can say "these X header files have this specific problem Y, and if we move part Z into a common area A, we'd solve it because B", that's a different matter.
See what I'm saying? Whole-sale "move things around because we want to" I'm not interested in. Specific problems, yes.
> Personally, I'd prefer us to move to using standard C99 types in lieu of u32 > and co at least for the interface to userspace because they are just that: > standard.
No. I told you why it cannot and MUST NOT be done. Repeat after me:
WE MUST NOT POLLUTE THE NAMESPACE!
There are many cases where including a header file means you want the structure, but it does _not_ mean that you can expose totally unrelated types, even if those types happen to be used as part of the structure. See what I'm saying?
In contrast, __u8/__u16/__xxx are explicitly defined by the relevant standards to be "system name space", and that is _exactly_ why we don't use the standard namespaces.
And the fact is, the rules for _when_ you export _which_ standard types are just too damn hard, and more importantly, they are not something that the kernel headers should even be deciding. They depend on glibc internal things like __USE_BSD etc, and they depend on which standard you compile for, and sometimes even on which _version_ of the standard you compile for.
I will not have that mess in the kernel. Which means that we do _not_ export any of the standard names. Which means that we can't _use_ any of them. End of story.
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