Re: Patch for 2.2.10 (Quelle surprise!)

Mike A. Harris (mharris@meteng.on.ca)
Sat, 3 Jul 1999 22:41:36 -0400 (EDT)


On Sat, 3 Jul 1999, Marcus Meissner wrote:

>>Here's a patch that implements a new syscall on the i386 architecture
>>along with a small test program. I'd love to hear your opinions on this.
>>
>>Basically it just returns a structure filled out with processor
>>information a la 'cat /proc/cpuinfo', except that this is done via a
>>syscall - no more horrid /proc parsing.
>
>I do not consider that horrid. I consider another system call horrid.
>
>Parsing /proc/ for such stuff is good(tm). Think scripting languages, like
>shell or perl.

I personally don't see why kernel bloat is not minimized, by
removing all the proc filesystem code, and doing everything in
minimalistic syscalls. Backwards compatibility could be kept
with modules, or another library, or something. Script writers
could use the backward compatible route without changing one line
of code, and new script writers could use the new library
interface that would be created by this...

I'm surprised that Linux has the /proc tree in kernel, however
I'm not an expert at this sort of thing, so perhaps I'm
overlooking reasons why it can't be done mostly in userland with
minimalistic syscalls.

TTYL

--
Mike A. Harris                   Linux advocate      GNU advocate
Computer Consultant                          Open Source advocate  

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot...

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/