Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Proposal for a userspace "architecture portability" library | From | Robert Love <> | Date | Sat, 04 Dec 2004 20:08:44 -0500 |
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On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 11:53 +1100, Paul Mackerras wrote:
> Some of our kernel headers implement generally useful abstractions > across all of the architectures we support. I would like to make an > "architecture portability" library, based on the kernel headers but as > a separate project from the kernel, and intended for use in userspace.
I think that this is an _awesome_ idea. Might want to check out what overlap there is with existing glibc interfaces. For example, I presume that glibc implements at least some of the atomic operations (but I also think having a full suite of atomic operations available is useful).
Some of the stuff, like semaphores, isn't really going to port very well to user-space. At least not directly, I would not think.
But on numerous occasions I have wanted the kernel's barriers, atomic operations, bitwise operations, or some of the compiler things we implement (likely, unlikely, fixes) in user-space.
> Now, clearly I can do this under the GPL. However, I think it would > be more useful to have the library under the LGPL, which requires > either getting the permission of the authors of the kernel files, or > rewriting them from scratch.
FWIW, you have my permission. I've touched spinlock.h a bunch.
Robert Love
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