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Documentation: Add a note on paths in the kernel development guidelines

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Add a note on hardcoded paths so everyone know that this is not an
appropriate thing to do when writing kernel code.
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Liav A 2022-12-02 11:55:23 +02:00 committed by Andrew Kaster
parent 6a555af1f1
commit 968e1a6efc
1 changed files with 15 additions and 0 deletions
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Documentation/Kernel/DevelopmentGuidelines.md
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@ -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,