“Timothy Witham announced an OSDL special interest group, the
Binary Testing SIG, for dicussing ways to ensure and verify that
the Linux kernel provides forward binary compatibility. Timothy
exaplins, ‘this is a real problem for large end users deploying
Linux in that they like to be able to run/roll forward the same
version of an application for 5 or so years. They can do this with
their legacy operating systems and we need to be able to do this
with Linux.’“Jeff Garzik noted that maintaining userland compatibility of
the application binary interface (ABI) ‘has always been a strongly
held value in Linux…'”