From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1424314AbWKJFVj (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:21:39 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1424356AbWKJFVj (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:21:39 -0500 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:24769 "EHLO ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1424314AbWKJFVi (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Nov 2006 00:21:38 -0500 From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) To: Alistair John Strachan Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl References: <200611092317.26459.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 22:21:13 -0700 In-Reply-To: <200611092317.26459.s0348365@sms.ed.ac.uk> (Alistair John Strachan's message of "Thu, 9 Nov 2006 23:17:26 +0000") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.110004 (No Gnus v0.4) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org 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). There is a thread a month or so ago about this where I did a request for testers, that listed all of the users we could find. The reality is that I don't think kernel developers can seriously find them. If someone actually wants to kill sys_sysctl more power to them. As long as we don't add more binary numbers I think it is actually easier to support it than to find those weird users and remove it. Eric