From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751224AbWBVBKV (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:10:21 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751248AbWBVBKV (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:10:21 -0500 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:55524 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751224AbWBVBKT (ORCPT ); Tue, 21 Feb 2006 20:10:19 -0500 Date: Tue, 21 Feb 2006 17:06:48 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Andrew Morton cc: Kay Sievers , penberg@cs.helsinki.fi, gregkh@suse.de, bunk@stusta.de, rml@novell.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, johnstul@us.ibm.com Subject: Re: 2.6.16-rc4: known regressions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <20060217231444.GM4422@stusta.de> <84144f020602190306o3149d51by82b8ccc6108af012@mail.gmail.com> <20060219145442.GA4971@stusta.de> <1140383653.11403.8.camel@localhost> <20060220010205.GB22738@suse.de> <1140562261.11278.6.camel@localhost> <20060221225718.GA12480@vrfy.org> <20060221153305.5d0b123f.akpm@osdl.org> <20060222000429.GB12480@vrfy.org> <20060221162104.6b8c35b1.akpm@osdl.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 21 Feb 2006, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > The only piece of user-space code we ship with the kernel is the system > call trampoline etc that the kernel sets up. THOSE interfaces we can > really change, because it changes with the kernel. Side note: if people want to, we could have other "trampolines" like that, so that we could have more user-level code that gets distributed with the kernel. It doesn't have to be something that gets mapped into every binary either: we could - if we wanted to - have things like shared libraries or helper shell scripts or whatever that we expose in /sys/shlib/ that are kernel-version dependent. Then we could perhaps change more things, just because we could change the wrappers that actually use them together with the kernel. To some degree, /initrd was supposed to do things like that, and in theory, it still could. However, realistically, 99% of any /initrd is more about the distribution than the kernel, so right now we have to count /initrd as a distribution thing, not a kernel thing. Linus