From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1424386AbWKJIuw (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:50:52 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1424387AbWKJIuw (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:50:52 -0500 Received: from mcr-smtp-002.bulldogdsl.com ([212.158.248.8]:3340 "EHLO mcr-smtp-002.bulldogdsl.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1424386AbWKJIuv (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:50:51 -0500 X-Spam-Abuse: Please report all spam/abuse matters to abuse@bulldogdsl.com From: Alistair John Strachan To: "Eric W. Biederman" Subject: Re: [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:50:50 +0000 User-Agent: KMail/1.9.5 Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <200611092317.26459.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Message-Id: <200611100850.50281.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Friday 10 November 2006 05:21, Eric W. Biederman wrote: > Alistair John Strachan writes: > > On Wednesday 08 November 2006 19:00, you wrote: > >> 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. > > > > Eric, do you have a list of the remaining users? It'd be good to know for > > people using Linux in an embedded environment, where they may want to > > switch off the option, but only if it doesn't break their userspace. > > They are very very few. The ones I recall are kudzu, radvd, and > libpthreads (which doesn't care). Neither do new versions of radvd, from what I can see. radvd.c/check_ip6_forwarding(): #ifdef __linux__ fp = fopen(PROC_SYS_IP6_FORWARDING, "r"); if (fp) { fscanf(fp, "%d", &value); fclose(fp); } else flog(LOG_DEBUG, "Correct IPv6 forwarding procfs entry not found, " "perhaps the procfs is disabled, " "or the kernel interface has changed?"); #endif /* __linux__ */ if (!fp && sysctl(forw_sysctl, sizeof(forw_sysctl)/sizeof(forw_sysctl[0]), &value, &size, NULL, 0) < 0) { flog(LOG_DEBUG, "Correct IPv6 forwarding sysctl branch not found, " "perhaps the kernel interface has changed?"); return(0); /* this is of advisory value only */ } Maybe you should just hold out until everybody fixes their programs ;-) -- Cheers, Alistair. Final year Computer Science undergraduate. 1F2 55 South Clerk Street, Edinburgh, UK.