kernel HEAD && userland 7.0-REL?

[Alexander Sack]

On Fri, Jul 4, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Mike Meyer
<mwm-keyword-freebsdhackers2.e313df at mired.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Jul 2008 14:42:27 +0200
> Matthias Apitz <guru at unixarea.de> wrote:
>> I'm running a RELENG_7 kernel and a userland as 7.0-REL on one of my
>> laptops; I've been asked to check if a given driver problem in RELENG_7 is as
>> well with HEAD... can I update the kernel to HEAD and let the userland
>> (and all my compiled ports) as 7.0-REL; I know that this is not the
>> intention, but it would cost me a lot of work if I should compile as
>> well ~200 ports....
>
> When you say HEAD, do you mean the HEAD of 8-CURRENT or 7-STABLE?  In
> either case whether or not it works depends on whether something has
> changed in the kernel that has a required userland change.
>
> On the other hand, if you mean 7-STABLE, then the ports should work
> properly whether userland does or not.

As a note, I just recently used HEAD on a 7_STABLE box to test changes
recently to re for an updated PCIe revision NIC card on my Eee Box.
It worked fine (both runtime and my NIC which I then patched my
7_STABLE tree which also worked, yea!).  In a thread I started about
cross platform building, it seems that historically FreeBSD has had a
very stable ABI allowing multiple kernels to run underneath different
versions of user land (this is certainly not the case for all *NIX
variants).

-aps