Comment by vbezhenar
1 year ago
I wonder if decision for stable syscalls was genius? Like imagine that Linux syscalls will become what C ABI is now. And there will be multiple compatible kernels, so you can choose any and run the same userspace.
1 year ago
I wonder if decision for stable syscalls was genius? Like imagine that Linux syscalls will become what C ABI is now. And there will be multiple compatible kernels, so you can choose any and run the same userspace.
Why would you want to support multiple? New versions should always be backwards compatible with older ones, so you'll always have the largest amount of compatibility by targeting the latest upstream. The real challenge comes with supporting applications that want features only available in forked kernels, which I guess could prompt wanting multiple kernels targeting the distinct ABIs.
You can ask the same question about libc, yet there are several competing implementations. Yes, compatibility is not perfect and there are applications which won't work on musl, but still plenty of applications do.