A 10-minute guide to the Linux ABI (opensource.com)

Alison Chaiken provides anoverview of Linux ABI concerns on opensource.com.

Understanding the stable ABI is a bit subtle. Consider that, whilemost of sysfs is stable ABI, the debug interfaces are guaranteed tobe unstable since they expose kernel internals to userspace. Ingeneral, Linus Torvalds has pronounced that by "don't breakuserspace," he means to protect ordinary users who "just want it towork" rather than system programmers and kernel engineers, whoshould be able to read the kernel documentation and source code tofigure out what has changed between releases.