From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1750878AbVKKQo7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:44:59 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1750879AbVKKQo7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:44:59 -0500 Received: from e31.co.us.ibm.com ([32.97.110.149]:49541 "EHLO e31.co.us.ibm.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750870AbVKKQo7 (ORCPT ); Fri, 11 Nov 2005 11:44:59 -0500 From: Tom Zanussi MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <17268.51814.215178.281986@tut.ibm.com> Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 10:44:22 -0600 To: akpm@osdl.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, karim@opersys.com Subject: [PATCH 0/12] relayfs: API additions and fixes X-Mailer: VM 7.19 under 21.4 (patch 15) "Security Through Obscurity" XEmacs Lucid Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hi, This patch set is essentially the same as the set I previously posted, but broken out into stepwise chunks. The patches implement or fix 3 things that were specifically requested or suggested by relayfs users: - support for non-relay files (patches 1-6) Currently, the relayfs API only supports the creation of directories (relayfs_create_dir()) and relay files (relay_open()). These patches adds support for non-relay files (relayfs_create_file()). This is so relayfs applications can create 'control files' in relayfs itself rather than in /proc or via a netlink channel, as is currently done in the relay-app examples. Basically what this amounts to is exporting relayfs_create_file() with an additional file_ops param that clients can use to supply file operations for their own special-purpose files in relayfs. - make exported relay file ops useful (patches 7-8) The relayfs relay_file_operations have always been exported, the intent being to make it possible to create relay files in other filesystems such as debugfs. The problem, though, is that currently the file operations are too tightly coupled to relayfs to actually be used for this purpose. This patch fixes that by adding a couple of callback functions that allow a client to hook into relay_open()/close() and supply the files that will be used to represent the channel buffers; the default implementation if no callbacks are defined is to create the files in relayfs. - add an option to create global relay buffer (patches 9-10) The file creation callback also supplies an optional param, is_global, that can be used by clients to create a single global relayfs buffer instead of the default per-cpu buffers. This was suggested as being useful for certain debugging applications where it's more convenient to be able to get all the data from a single channel without having to go to the bother of dealing with per-cpu files. - cleanup, some renaming and Documentation updates (patches 11-12) There were several comments that the use of netlink in the example code was non-intuitive and in fact the whole relay-app business was needlessly confusing. Based on that feedback, the example code has been completely converted over to relayfs control files as supported by this patch, and have also been made completely self-contained. The converted examples along with a couple of new examples that demonstrate using exported relay files can be found in relay-apps tarball: http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/relayfs/relay-apps-0.9.tar.gz?download Tom