|
|
You should seriously consider the benefits of building your products in conformance with the binary compatibility specification that matches your intended market. For UnixWare and other UNIX System V derived operating systems on the Intel architecture, this specification can be found in the following documents:
Discusses ABI issues that are generic to all hardware platforms.
Covers issues that are specific to the Intel platform.
An extension of the ABI with additional Intel specifics.
These specifications include information for both system vendors and application developers. For system developers, they specify the APIs that must be provided, and the formats of binary files and data that are necessary for binary compatibility. For application developers, they list the APIs guaranteed to be present on conforming systems, and the way applications should be built and packaged so that their binaries will install and run on all conforming systems.
The benefit of using an ABI is that the same binary distribution of your product runs on systems from many vendors, rather than having to be ported and compiled separately for each system. You can sell each shrink-wrapped unit into a significantly larger market than would otherwise be the case.
The ABIs also specify: