From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1945891AbXCaGyU (ORCPT ); Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:54:20 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1945933AbXCaGyU (ORCPT ); Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:54:20 -0400 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:39981 "EHLO ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1945891AbXCaGyT (ORCPT ); Sat, 31 Mar 2007 02:54:19 -0400 From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) To: Helge Hafting Cc: Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: 2.6.21-rc5-mm2 - compile error on x86-64 References: <20070326211627.c681af3b.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070329182020.GA9223@aitel.hist.no> <20070329142816.5d18d89f.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20070331062743.GA26131@aitel.hist.no> Date: Sat, 31 Mar 2007 00:53:38 -0600 In-Reply-To: <20070331062743.GA26131@aitel.hist.no> (Helge Hafting's message of "Sat, 31 Mar 2007 08:27:43 +0200") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) 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 Helge Hafting writes: > Correct. I seem to remember that the latter is considered > "deprecated, but some programs may still depend on it". So I disabled it to > see what broke. udev complained about the missing /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug, > but was happy to use /sys/kernel/uevent_helper instead. I didn't > notice other problems, so I left things like that. Well if anything it is the other way around. The preferred interface to sysctls is /proc/sys. There is the whole thing where people aren't to happy with non-process related things in /proc, so in that sense there is a bit of deprecation, but /proc and /proc/sys are fully supported. The plethora of configuration is what remains when I dug into the binary sys_sysctl interface and tested the assertion that no one uses it, and it has been deprecated for years and we could just kill it. We can now remove the binary sys_sysctl syscall while keeping /proc/sys support. Someday I might even get ambitious and add the appropriate deprecated warnings so we can kill the binary interface. I got as far as seeing that there were a small handful of real programs that use sys_sysctl. I looked at how were giving notice and realized that was insufficient to tell users we were deprecating the thing. I didn't see much point (except being able to immediate drop support) to removing sys_sysctl and since we would have to go a couple of years still supporting it to remove it properly I got lazy and stopped. Maybe myself or someone else can get ambitious and deprecate sys_sysctl properly and we can remove it one of these years... Eric