From: Eric W. Biederman Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2006 01:44:51 +0000 (-0800) Subject: [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl X-Git-Tag: v2.6.19-rc6~51 X-Git-Url: http://git.openpandora.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=13bb7e37e5081d03643e2bd64f3f5d21f32e7221;p=pandora-kernel.git [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl 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 Acked-by: Alan Cox Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Reading git-diff-tree failed