[Xen-devel] minios, use of namespace

[Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For a while I've been intending to provide a better environment for PV
baremetal guests.  The current arrangements, based on newlib, take
quite a bit of porting for many programs.  My plan is to take the
FreeBSD libc, and write a set of functions implementing the "system
calls" in terms of facilities provided by the Xen PV environment,
frontend drivers, etc.

As part of this I intend to reuse much if not all of
xen.git/extras/mini-os.  However, there is a difficulty with this: the
functions there have very generic names which if nothing is done will
get in the way of porting applications.

It might be possible to deal with this by symbol hiding - except for
the fact that some applications will want to "open the hatch" and
bypass the provided POSIX API to deal with Xen features directly.  The
alternative would be to write an emulated gntdev with an emulated
ioctl etc., which would just be grim.

So I think the best solution is to rename the functions in minios to
use names starting with _.  External symbols starting with _ are
reserved (by the C specification) for "the implementation", which is
what we are.

I will also probably find that I want to #ifdef out some bits of
minios, but I don't expect that to be particularly controversial.

All the changes I make will, when I submit them as a proper patch
series, come with corresponding changes to the in-tree consumers of
minios.

I won't be producing a patch series to do this particularly soon, but
I thought I should mention this plan here to see if anyone objects.
CCing Samuel who knows most about the existing minios and stubdom
arrangements.

Thanks,
Ian.

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