Re: Death of KERN_JAVA_* sysctl
Matthew Wilcox (Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com)
Sun, 11 Jul 1999 01:23:00 +0200
On Sat, Jul 10, 1999 at 03:43:33PM -0700, Nate Eldredge wrote:
> Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> >
> > On Sun, Jul 11, 1999 at 12:11:48AM +0200, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> > > On Sat, Jul 10, 1999 at 01:12:57PM -0700, Nate Eldredge wrote:
> > >
> > > > Why have KERN_JAVA_* been removed from linux/sysctl.h? (as of 2.3.9)
> > > >
> > > > This is a problem for anything in userspace that uses these values; it
> > > > won't compile anymore, and since it's an enum there's no way to check
> > > > for it. (strace uses them, for one.)
> > >
> > > It's not the first time that sysctl got broken that way.
> >
> > Last time sysctl got broken that way, I went through and explicitly
> > numbered all the sysctls. Someone would now have to be particularly
> > and obviously stupid to break sysctl.
>
> Like this? (From patch-2.3.9)
>
> --- v2.3.8/linux/include/linux/sysctl.h Thu Jun 3 16:21:47 1999
> +++ linux/include/linux/sysctl.h Fri Jun 25 01:05:12 1999
> @@ -82,8 +82,6 @@
> KERN_PANIC=15, /* int: panic timeout */
> KERN_REALROOTDEV=16, /* real root device to mount after
> initrd */
>
> - KERN_JAVA_INTERPRETER=19, /* path to Java(tm) interpreter */
> - KERN_JAVA_APPLETVIEWER=20, /* path to Java(tm) appletviewer */
> KERN_SPARC_REBOOT=21, /* reboot command on Sparc */
> KERN_CTLALTDEL=22, /* int: allow ctl-alt-del to reboot */
> KERN_PRINTK=23, /* struct: control printk logging
> parameters */
>
> Does that mean that it shouldn't have been done?
>
> Oh, clarification-- I meant, anything that uses KERN_JAVA_* will break.
> Use of the other constants still has no problems.
That's fine then. Java support was marked as `obsolete' in 2.2 and
will be removed for 2.4. I'm not quite sure why anyone bothered to
remove the constants -- I don't see that it really harms us to leave
them in.
--
Matthew Wilcox <willy@bofh.ai>
"Windows and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of
specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a
painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture." - N Stephenson
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