Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 5 Dec 2004 11:53:43 +1100 | From | Paul Mackerras <> | Subject | Proposal for a userspace "architecture portability" library |
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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.
The headers that I want to base this on are:
atomic.h bitops.h byteorder.h rwsem.h semaphore.h spinlock.h system.h (for mb et al., xchg, cmpxchg) unaligned.h
There are some others that may also be useful: cache.h, checksum.h, io.h, xor.h.
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.
Linus (and other kernel copyright holders) - would you be willing to relicense such of the above files that have your copyright under the LGPL for this purpose?
I'm looking for volunteers to help with porting and testing on various architectures. I can do x86, ppc and ppc64, and I know sparc{,64} and m68k assembler, but for the rest I'll need help.
My hope is that distributions will be able to use this to replace some of the headers in /usr/include/asm, and thus reduce the desire for applications to include kernel headers.
Paul.
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