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| author | Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> | 2006-11-08 17:44:51 -0800 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Linus Torvalds <torvalds@g5.osdl.org> | 2006-11-08 18:29:24 -0800 |
| commit | 13bb7e37e5081d03643e2bd64f3f5d21f32e7221 (patch) | |
| tree | d7dc30aa8b7f852a3a8b264eb1822140d32f564c /Documentation | |
| parent | 6c33eb39976b67628452ebc791834c7d590e545e (diff) | |
| download | linux-13bb7e37e5081d03643e2bd64f3f5d21f32e7221.tar.bz2 | |
[PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl
The basic issue is that despite have been deprecated and warned about as a
very bad thing in the man pages since its inception there are a few real
users of sys_sysctl. It was my assumption that because sysctl had been
deprecated for all of 2.6 there would be no user space users by this point,
so I initially gave sys_sysctl a very short deprecation period.
Now that I know there are a few real users the only sane way to proceed
with deprecation is to push the time limit out to a year or two work and
work with distributions that have big testing pools like fedora core to
find these last remaining users.
Which means that the sys_sysctl interface needs to be maintained in the
meantime.
Since I have provided a technical measure that allows us to add new sysctl
entries without reserving more binary numbers I believe that is enough to
fix the sys_sysctl binary interface maintenance problems, because there is
no longer a need to change the binary interface at all.
Since the sys_sysctl implementation needs to stay around for a while and
the worst of the maintenance issues that caused us to occasionally break
the ABI have been addressed I don't see any advantage in continuing with
the removal of sys_sysctl.
So instead of merely increasing the deprecation period this patch removes
the deprecation of sys_sysctl and modifies the kernel to compile the code
in by default.
With committing to maintain sys_sysctl we get all of the advantages of a
fast interface for anything that needs it. Currently sys_sysctl is about
5x faster than /proc/sys, for the same string data.
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt | 12 |
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 12 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt index 1ac3c74646e3..d52c4aaaf17f 100644 --- a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt +++ b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt @@ -53,18 +53,6 @@ Who: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@brturbo.com.br> --------------------------- -What: sys_sysctl -When: January 2007 -Why: The same information is available through /proc/sys and that is the - interface user space prefers to use. And there do not appear to be - any existing user in user space of sys_sysctl. The additional - maintenance overhead of keeping a set of binary names gets - in the way of doing a good job of maintaining this interface. - -Who: Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> - ---------------------------- - What: PCMCIA control ioctl (needed for pcmcia-cs [cardmgr, cardctl]) When: November 2005 Files: drivers/pcmcia/: pcmcia_ioctl.c |