[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 <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Acked-by: Alan Cox <alan@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2 files changed