Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [MAINTAINER TOPIC] ABI feature gates?

[Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@lip6.fr>]

On Mon, 14 Aug 2017, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 12:49 PM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, 4 Aug 2017 09:04:54 -0700
> > Greg KH <greg@kroah.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> >> We could start searching linux-next for new additions of sysfs files
> >> (search for the ATTR macros), and complain that there are no matching
> >> Documentation/ABI/ updates at the same time.  I try to do that when
> >> reviewing patches that come through my trees, but yes, this is hard to
> >> keep up to date with.
> >>
> >> Sounds like a good GSoC project though, setting up the infrastructure to
> >> do this in a semi-automated fashion.
> >
> > And perhaps do the same for new tracepoints.
>
> Honestly, the *real* issue has traditionally been new ioctl's, not so
> much sysfs files or tracepoints.
>
> People add random device-specific crud that then has issues with
> alignment or word size.

In terms of documentation, there are around 2500 names defined using _IOW,
_IOR, or _IOWR, and around 500 of them are mentioned somewhere in
Documentation.

julia