alt Hacker NewsIn 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-off consideration led to a different outcome for in-kernel api’s, but given the work done to ensure the stability of the userland abi, I’m sure there is thought behind it..
Replies
musicale • yesterday at 2:49 PM
> 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...
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.