Boyd Adamson wrote:
> On 3/8/07, Garrett D'Amore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Now, NetBSD is a totally different beast. They provide a lot of
>> backwards compatibility, and generally any incompatible change that
>> might cause breakage is heavily frowned upon. There have been
>> exceptions, but they are few and far between. (The NetBSD "way" of
>> providing compatibility is different than Solaris' however. I can
>> provide more info if you're really curious.)
>
> It's way off topic, but I'm curious.
Basically, the idea is that you can have separate userland's, and they
have "compat" kernel modules which provide different versions of the
system call interfaces. If you want to run NetBSD 1.x, you have to keep
around a 1.x userland, but you can run that userland on a NetBSD 4.0
kernel if you have included the necessary compatibility code in the
kernel.
API changes in other bits of userland are just generally frowned on,
particularly if there is risk of breakage resulting.
There generally is _no_ compatibility guarantee for intra-kernel APIs in
NetBSD.
-- Garrett
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