Comment by mike_hearn

You actually can do that using inline assembly, it's just a very obscure trick. Many years ago I wrote a tool that generated a header file locking any code compiled with it to older symbol versions. It was called apbuild but it stopped being maintained some years after I stopped doing Linux stuff. I see from the comments below that someone else has made something similar, although apbuild was a comprehensive solution that wrapped gcc. It wasn't just a symbol versioning header, it did all sorts of tricks. Whatever was necessary to make things Just Work when compiling on a newer distro for an older distro.