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Re: [PATCH v2] libio: use PTR_MANGLE/PTR_DEMANGLE for FILE vtables


On Thu, 15 Oct 2015, Florian Weimer wrote:

> > Well, I think the starting point is that those are valid binaries that 
> > users who've kept their binaries and libstdc++.so shared libraries should 
> > be able to expect to continue to work - that we don't break binary 
> > compatibility for users using documented interfaces in the documented way.
> 
> I respect your view, but we did that for errno (and presumably _res and
> h_errno, but I have less experience with that) and the i386 ABI bump for
> SSE stack alignment.

As I said, starting point.  The basic presumption is against breaking any 
valid binaries; sometimes it may be rebutted, but that needs a compelling 
case to justify the breakage.

In the SSE stack alignment case I think we ought to be realigning the 
stack on entry to glibc at entry points that existed long enough ago and 
where SSE is used in a way that requires 16-byte alignment, as I said in 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2013-08/msg00372.html>.

It would, admittedly, be convenient if we could do the occasional global 
ABI transition with SONAME bump to limit how long compatibility is needed 
with problematic old ABIs - we've had libc.so.6 a lot longer than 
GNU/Linux had either libc.so.4 or libc.so.5.  But given how it seems to 
have been concluded that's not practical for libstdc++ I suppose it's not 
practical for libc either (on some architectures - the ARM move to EABI 
went fine).

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com


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