userapi: message versioning
Peter da Silva
peter-dragonfly at taronga.com
Mon Jul 21 10:19:33 PDT 2003
Matt: I've been thinking about what you said about versioning, and I
think that there needs to be a convention that no message size or format
should be changed without a change to the message: the kernel should
always accept an older format message or reject it (EINVAL?).
Whether this is handled by updating the system call number or by having
a version number field in the message doesn't really matter: a version
field would make for an easier userland trap for emulating older APIs,
changing the syscall number would make for a more efficient trap in the
kernel.
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