Subject: Re: "here we go again"... another push for /sys subdir... 8-)
To: Chris G. Demetriou <cgd@nobozo.cs.berkeley.edu>
From: None <andrewh@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au>
List: tech-kern
Date: 11/18/1993 13:16:23
>This time i'm asking (again) for /sys/compat, or a similar-named
>beast.
...
>well, we're getting a slowly-growing number of "compatibility
>switches" in /sys/kern, or in the ports themselves.
>
>i'm not going to count hpux compat stuff (though it should count; it
>*could* run on multiple architectures) nor ultrix compat stuff,
>but right now we've got:
>	sunos compat stuff, being used by the sparc and the amiga
>		(seperate copies in each tree!  eek!  hopefully
>		the mac and sun3 will use this code soon, too)
>	sysv compat stuff (semaphores, shared mem, message queues)
>
>the former *definitely* belongs in a 'common' area (and the first
>person who suggest /sys/sunos eats lead...  8-).  The latter doesn't
>really belong in /sys/kern, in my opinion.

I have no idea what the best names are, but perhaps something like this would
be good:

/sys/compat	- compatibility code that involves using a different syscall
		table from the standard one in /sys/kern

/sys/kern/compat - compatibility code that represents extensions to the base
		4.4BSD-ish kernel calls.

/sys/ufs/compat - compatibility extensions to the ufs filesystem
...

I think that the present categorisation of kernel source into kern, vm,
networking and various filesystems should still be used for all but the
weirdest compatibility code.

Andrew

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