Re: [PATCH] arm: ioperm use /proc/sys not sysctl

[ebiederm at xmission dot com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Phil Blundell <pb@reciva.com> writes:

> On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 21:58 -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> sysctl is essentially unmaintained bloat in the linux kernel
>> and is scheduled for removal in a year or so, meanwhile the
>> /proc/sys interface will remain and has always existed.
>> 
>> So use /proc/sys instead of sysctl in the implementation
>> of ioperm so it continues to work even when sysctl is not
>> present in the kernel.
>
> Thanks for the patch.  
>
> I think I would prefer to see the sysctl support retained, at least for
> the time being.  Reading files from /proc obviously relies on that
> filesystem being mounted which is not necessarily the case at all times.
> The sysctl interface is also faster, when it works, than reading
> from /proc.

You mean try sysctl and then /proc?  That sounds reasonable.

I don't know of enough sysctl users to make the case for keeping the
kernel implementation enabled by default past it's scheduled removal
date.

> Aside from that, some specific comments about your patch:
>
>  - please format your code according to the GNU standards;

Didn't I?  I thought I matched the style in that file.

>  - please supply an appropriate changelog entry

I have to confess the gnus changelogs don't make any sense to me.
I understand why everyone's Changlog entries should be the in
the same format.  

When I have seen them the GNU changelogs seem to be saying I did
xyz (which you can see from the diff).  Instead of saying why
someone did xyz.  Perhaps after I get some more sleep I can
figure out that foreign tongue

>  - it seems unnecessary to memset() the whole of "buf" to zero.  I think
> just doing "buf[ret] = 0;" after the read() call would suffice.

Just simple paranoia, and laziness.  The memset is not essential.

> Do you have a copyright assignment on file for glibc?  This change is
> maybe small enough to accept without but it is borderline and an
> assignment would be better.

I do not have a copyright assignment.

Eric