Comment by vlovich123
2 years ago
I didn’t mean to imply that glibc’s API isn’t stable. Just that the stable API boundary for the kernel on Linux is the syscall ABI, not libc.
2 years ago
I didn’t mean to imply that glibc’s API isn’t stable. Just that the stable API boundary for the kernel on Linux is the syscall ABI, not libc.
Another stable ABI boundary is anything produced by glibc that can be conceivably placed into memory shared by different unrelated processes (ie. Posix IPC primitives). The requirement for backwards compatibility and architecture variant compatibility (32b/64b…) is the largest reason why things like pthread_mutex have somewhat large overhead and why it is worthwhile to invent various iterations of “futex in userspace”.
Ah sorry, I misunderstood
No worries. My wording was muddled.