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| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/Kernel/DevelopmentGuidelines.md | 15 |
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diff --git a/Documentation/Kernel/DevelopmentGuidelines.md b/Documentation/Kernel/DevelopmentGuidelines.md index 57bc93480d..9677db41a5 100644 --- a/Documentation/Kernel/DevelopmentGuidelines.md +++ b/Documentation/Kernel/DevelopmentGuidelines.md @@ -123,6 +123,21 @@ as long as it doesn't hurt other security measures. We also consider performance metrics, so a tradeoff between two mostly-contradictive metrics is to be discussed when an issue arises. +## No hardcoded userspace paths + +To ensure the kernel stays flexible to future changes, we should not put hardcoded +paths or assume where filesystem items (nor where filesystems are mounted) reside on - we should +always let userspace to inform the kernel about paths and assume nothing else. +Even when it's obvious some file will always be located in a certain path, it is considered +a violation of an abstraction layer to hardcode it in the kernel code, because we put an hard effort +to keep the abstractions we have intact and clean. + +There's one exception to this rule - the kernel will use a `dbgln` statement to +warn the user in case that the dynamic loader is not the usual binary we use. +To generalize the exception a bit more - debug messages (being used sparingly) with +assumption of paths could be OK, as long as they never have any functional implication +on the user. + ## Documentation As with any documentation, it's always good to see more of it, either with a new manual page, |