Documentation/ABI: document the non-ABI status of Kconfig and symbols

Discussion at Kernel Summit made it clear that the presence or absence of
specific Kconfig symbols are not considered ABI, and that no userspace (or
bootloader, etc) should rely on them.

In addition, kernel-internal symbols are well established as non-ABI, per
Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt.

Document both of these in Documentation/ABI/README, in a new section for
notable bits of non-ABI.

Signed-off-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Cc: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Cc: Tao Ma <boyu.mt@taobao.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Richard Weinberger <richard.weinberger@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
This commit is contained in:
Josh Triplett 2013-11-12 15:11:14 -08:00 committed by Linus Torvalds
parent e946c43a11
commit ee2f51dc01
1 changed files with 13 additions and 0 deletions

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@ -72,3 +72,16 @@ kernel tree without going through the obsolete state first.
It's up to the developer to place their interfaces in the category they
wish for it to start out in.
Notable bits of non-ABI, which should not under any circumstances be considered
stable:
- Kconfig. Userspace should not rely on the presence or absence of any
particular Kconfig symbol, in /proc/config.gz, in the copy of .config
commonly installed to /boot, or in any invocation of the kernel build
process.
- Kernel-internal symbols. Do not rely on the presence, absence, location, or
type of any kernel symbol, either in System.map files or the kernel binary
itself. See Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt.