I'm building busy-box and iptables for an embedded device and one of the dependencies for them are the kernel headers.
I have searched the whole file system for *.ko files and found none. So i concluded the apps aren't creating any loadable drivers (kernel modules).
What are other cases for a user space application to require kernel headers?
Best Answer
Because those programs are build to use things defined in the kernel headers:
For each specific tool, you'd need to read the source of the tool and the relevant kernel header to figure out exactly what.
You can see a few things are commented to make it easy.
For example,
mkfs_vfat
includeslinux/fd.h
to getFDGETPRM
:You could probably remove the relevant
#include
and watch for compiler errors to make it easier, you'll get warnings that some things are not defined. Those things likely come from the kernel headers.