Re: [patch] jiffies wraparound [Re: 2.1.125 Show stopper list: Draft]

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Thu, 22 Oct 1998 23:26:57 -0700 (PDT)


On Fri, 23 Oct 1998, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> For proc-reading stuff we can easily check their personality
> (if current->personality == HZ_3k)
> fake_hz();
>
> Supporting different proc readouts is just as easy as
> supporting different personalities. If you don't believe
> me I could code up some example code for you...

I'd much rather have some of the /proc files cleaned up.

You have to realize that much of /proc was done without thinking about the
best interface. There's a few files that have _really_ ugly problems, and
the thing with times is part of it. But they have other problems, like
endianness issues too: IP addresses are stupidly given as HEX numbers, and
depending on what endianness your machine is, the same IP address looks
different.

I'd prefer to not have any proc-reading programs check for any
personalities, I'd like to have people look into the _real_ problem which
is that /proc files aren't "portable".

Remember: you may want to NFS-export /proc. I've done it. It's a really
cool thing to do. It's conceptually something really useful (imagine a
remote xload facility ;). It just doesn't work too well due to
nonportability issues in the file formats.

If somebody were to send me patches like that, I would at least not flame
them. I flame stupidity, not fixing problems.

Linus

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