[ovs-discuss] compat-2.6 directory question

Jesse Gross jesse at nicira.com
Thu Mar 15 17:08:18 UTC 2012


On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 9:41 AM, Zoltan Kiss <zoltan.kiss at citrix.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've studied the contents of datapath/linux-2.6/compat-2.6 directory, but I
> couldn't fully understand what is the purpose of that code. It seems to
> override (?) some kernel function definitions, but it doesn't fully makes
> sense to me. I guess it might be obvious, but can you help me by explaining
> it?

There's no internal stable APIs in the Linux kernel so in order for a
single piece of code to operate across multiple versions there needs
to be a compatibility layer.  The compat directory implements that
compatibility layer by attempting to emulate functions of newer
kernels on older ones.



More information about the discuss mailing list