From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1161532AbWKHTA6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Nov 2006 14:00:58 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1161683AbWKHTA6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Nov 2006 14:00:58 -0500 Received: from ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com ([166.70.28.69]:23227 "EHLO ebiederm.dsl.xmission.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1161532AbWKHTA6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 8 Nov 2006 14:00:58 -0500 From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) To: Linus Torvalds Subject: [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl cc: , Andrew Morton , Andi Kleen , alan@redhat.com, Russell King , Jakub Jelinek , Mike Galbraith , Albert Cahalan , Bill Nottingham , Marco Roeland , Michael Kerrisk Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:00:10 -0700 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 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 --- Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt | 12 ------------ init/Kconfig | 2 +- 2 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) diff --git a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt index 1ac3c74..d52c4aa 100644 --- a/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt +++ b/Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt @@ -53,18 +53,6 @@ Who: Mauro Carvalho Chehab - ---------------------------- - What: PCMCIA control ioctl (needed for pcmcia-cs [cardmgr, cardctl]) When: November 2005 Files: drivers/pcmcia/: pcmcia_ioctl.c diff --git a/init/Kconfig b/init/Kconfig index c8b2624..e85e554 100644 --- a/init/Kconfig +++ b/init/Kconfig @@ -304,7 +304,7 @@ config UID16 config SYSCTL_SYSCALL bool "Sysctl syscall support" if EMBEDDED - default n + default y select SYSCTL ---help--- Enable the deprecated sysctl system call. sys_sysctl uses -- 1.4.2.rc3.g7e18e-dirty