On 6 Jan 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> >And finally, what's up with sysctl? Are driver writers recommended to use
> >that over extending /proc or is it deprecated? Again guide lines would be
> >nice.
>
> sysctl is deprecated. It's useful in one way only: it has some nice
> functions that can be used to add a block of /proc names. However, it
> has other downsides (allocating silly numbers etc - there should be no
> need for that, considering that the /proc namespace is alreayd a
> perfectly good namespace).
Oh, please! All we need is sysctlbyname(2) - _not_ a problem, and closes
all problems with numbers. And it should not work through mounted procfs -
we can traverse the tree doing comparisons by name just fine. The fact
that sysctl(8) needs mounted procfs is an artificial misfeature, nothing
more.
What _is_ bogus is the idea of sysctl() doing more than read/write access
to constant-sized variables. Or procfs entries doing ioctl(), for that
matter - just look at /proc/mtrr, for one specimen.
sysctl() is a perfectly reasonable subset of pseudofs-type stuff, with
well-defined semantics (unlike the rest ;-/). The rest is pretty much a
maze of twisted little formats, none alike. IMO dissolving the thing is
_not_ a good idea. You have the final word, indeed, but I think that
sysctlbyname() may remove most of the problems.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jan 07 2000 - 21:00:07 EST