On Sat, Mar 16, 2019 at 4:40 PM shuah <shuah@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > usbip tool is tied to the kernel version. This is reason why it is > co-located with the usbip driver in the kernel sources. This is not > a typical tool scenario to be able to use new tool on old kernels. > > I would like to understand the reasons for wanting to run new tool on > old kernels. On Chromium OS, we ship more or less the same user space for a variety of systems, but not all of those run the same kernel. That's not exactly a novel concept -- many good tools are written such that they degrade gracefully when running with reduced feature sets (e.g., older kernels). While we are working on reducing the divergence and number of kernels we ship, it's currently a fact of life that we have to support multiple target kernel versions. Is there a fundamental problem with VHCI such that it doesn't have a stable ABI that tools can be written against? If stability is possible but you just don't care, then I guess we can fork our own version... Or even worse, we could build N copies of usbip for N kernels. But we don't do that for any other user space component. Brian
