What is the FreeBSD situation?

[codephantom]

On Thursday, 2 November 2017 at 04:25:26 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> From the recent PR-related discussion I gather that FreeBSD 12 
> has made some breaking changes to file primitives such as stat.
>
> Do binaries built for pre-v12 crash on v12? If that's the case 
> we should have two distinct build platforms, FreeBSD "legacy" 
> and FreeBSD 12. They would be selected statically.
>
> IF older binaries don't crash, what mechanism is FreeBSD 12 
> using to identify old API calls?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei


Targetted versioning should be implemented. Full stop ;-)

Pre ino64 ABI compatibility can be obtained in 12, **if** the 
kernel is compiled with option COMPAT_FREEBSD11 (presumably this 
option is enabled in the DEFAULT kernel)...

That option enables 'several techniques' that can mitigate for 
ABI breakage, but it won't work for all cases - really depends on 
what the application is doing with struct stat.


https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/sys/stat.h?view=markup#l158