On Wed, Mar 10, 1999 at 01:05:40PM -0600, Brian C. Grayson wrote:
>   The problem with binary format is, if the kernel changes, bang!
> ps/top/systat/xosview are useless until you can upgrade userland.

That's not true. While this is a problem, it is not a problem with
binary format itself. You can have the exact same problem with
the text format (which you acknowledge; you've introduced versioning
into that).

The real problem is, whether you have a 1:1 kernel->userspace data
structure mapping without some extra version/tag/whatever information.
If you do this, you will have this problem, whatever encoding you're
using. Jukka's message shows one way to circumvent this when using
a binary format.

- Frank