On 21/07/2011 15:15, Chad Perrin wrote:
It may not be anything so exotic. On a per-release basis, the MS Windows ABIs and APIs change far more dramatically than the Linux kernel, and are far less transparent to developers; they must in many cases be discovered by experimentation, being closed source software. Over a given period of time, the changes to Linux may be greater in number and magnitude (I'm not a kernel hacker, so I wouldn't know for sure), but they're spread out over time rather than bundled in a major collection of changes with a new marketing campaign. This might make it much more difficult to target the MS Windows ABIs and APIs. I'm just speculating, though. As I said, I'm not a kernel hacker.
On Windows, the APIs don't change that much (there are new functions for NUMA support in Windows 7 for example), but certain ABIs change with each service pack. However, since a lot of drivers built for Windows XP can still install on Windows 7, an effort appears to be made to maintain a stable public ABI - Microsoft recommends using the build environment for the earliest version of Windows that you want to target. On Linux, the API/ABI issue is far worse, since you have a different ABI between different builds of the same kernel.
-- Bruce Cran _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
