• Eric W. Biederman's avatar
    [PATCH] sysctl: Undeprecate sys_sysctl · 13bb7e37
    Eric W. Biederman authored
    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: default avatarEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarAlan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    13bb7e37
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