| Hi David, I just want to provide a quick clarification from the IETF side regarding categories of RFCs. Not all the RFCs we produce are standards. On a broad level we have standards track and informational documents (among others; more details in RFC2026). I do believe there is value in *documenting* some of the items that belong in an ABI such as the calling convention (similar to what is in Section 2 of the ISA draft). Similarly, there is value in documenting conventions and guidelines for creating portable binaries if we believe that is a useful goal, even though there will be a lot of programs that will not be portable (e.g. using cgroups). I would not expect these to be Standards track documents but rather Informational specifications to help implementers. If that sounds reasonable we can keep the text in the charter (with some minor rewording) and work on categorizing potential deliverables by Document Status (as would anyway be necessitated by Éric Vyncke’s BLOCK).
On Tue, May 23, 2023 at 01:58:18PM -0400, Michael Richardson wrote:
David Vernet <void@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As far as I know (please correct me if I'm wrong), there isn't really a
precedence for standardizing ABIs like this. For example, x86 calling
All of the eBPF work seems unprecedented.
I don't see having this in the charter is a problem.
We may fail to get consensus on it, and not make a milestone, but I don't see
a reason not to be allowed to talk about this.
(and maybe in the end, it's a no-op)
Hi Michael,So apologies in advance if my lack of experience with IETF proceedingsis glaringly obvious, and I'd appreciate clarification in any situationin which I'm mistaken.My understanding based on the conversations that I've had thus far isthat part of the goal of arriving at the finalized WG charter is todetermine what's in scope and out of scope. It's a bit of a murkyproposition because some things that we think _could_ be in scope, suchas in this case topics related to psABI, may not end up having adocument if we can't get consensus. In other words, being in the WGcharter doesn't imply that something is in-scope and will have adocument written, but _not_ being in the charter does preclude it frombeing discussed in this iteration of the WG because of this line:The working group shall not adopt new work until these
documents have progressed to working group last call.
The implication of this is that it's not necessarily a problem to havesome false-positives in terms of what we cover, but it can beproblematic if we leave out something important because we'll have tocover all of the other topics first. I'd imagine this would tend to makethe default behavior for deciding scope in WG charters to be permissiverather than dissmive, which makes sense to me.Assuming I haven't already gone off the rails in terms of myunderstanding, let me try to clarify why despite all that, I still thinkit's warranted for us to remove psABI as part of the scope of the WG.There are really two main reasons:1. As is hopefully clear at this point, there is a wide and historical industry precedence for not standardizing on psABI. For example, to my knowledge, RISC-V [0] develops and ratifies the RISC-V ISA through the RISC-V International Technical Working Groups, but there is no such ratified standard or specification for RISC-V calling conventions (the operative word of course being "convention"). The same is true (to my knowledge) of _all_ psABI ELF extensions, as Jose pointed out earlier in the conversation.[0]: https://riscv.org/technical/specifications/ With all that said, unless there's more context behind why we think we need to standardize psABI which hasn't yet been brought forward, I don't see any way we'd achieve consensus when we discuss it in the WG. And the reason I specifically think that's the case for ABI (ELF or otherwise) is that there's such a well-established precedence already for not standardizing it. I guess it's true that there's no harm in including it and discussing it, but as things currently stand, it also doesn't seem very productive to include it if there's already (IMHO) reasonably clear evidence that it's out of scope. To go back to my claim made in another email, I think the onus is on the folks who think it's in scope to explain why, rather than the folks who think we should follow industry precedence to justify that.2. Assuming that I'm wrong, and ABI / ELF are in scope for standardization, we would still have to do a lot of premliminary work to determine that. For example, we may end up wanting to standardize that maps are put into .maps sections in an ELF file, but that would only make sense if we created a document standardizing cross-platform map types. The same holds true for cross-platform program types, etc. The dependency DAG for discussing ELF has a depth of at least 2, and given that it's as-yet unclear whether ELF / psABI is an appropriate topic for standardization in the first place, it really feels to me like leaving it out of the WG is the right move.Thanks,David
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Michael Richardson <mcr+IETF@xxxxxxxxxxxx> . o O ( IPv6 IøT consulting )
Sandelman Software Works Inc, Ottawa and Worldwide
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