KPI: Kernel Public Interface

The Kernel Public Interface (KPI) is the lowest level user-space library that an application links with. As the name suggests it is the common interface definition between the kernel and user-space programs. It is special because it is the only library that is shared between user and kernel code.

The KPI contains the syscall interface and various struct definitions that are exchanged between the kernel and user-space. If in the future, we care about ABI compatibility, we would not try to keep the syscall ABI compatible but would rather enforce compatibility at the KPI boundary.

Typically, the KPI functionality will rarely be accessed directly by an application. Instead, many parts of it are re-exported or wrapped by the vibrio library OS. The kpi code is found in lib/kpi.