30 Sep
2017
30 Sep
'17
10:29 p.m.
I never really considered proc vs sysctl as deeply as this discussion.
Both seem like a little bit of a stretch and cause some impedance
mismatch in ways they are actually used. For instance on FreeBSD you
can pass opaque structures around and that's how some of the utils
work -- these aren't displayed using sysctl(8). So now you have ABI
over a text API anyway.
I seem to recall proc is loosely deprecated in Linux anyway in favor
of sysfs. GregKH mentioned people misuse both, for instance making
them output pretty histograms instead of simple text values, that
defeat the fundamental design tenants of these interfaces -- which is
to try and maintain a stable API.
One thing I think Linux did pretty well is the whole object
orientation in C thing with kobject, and that nets you automatic sysfs
directories and nodes for pretty much everything.
Lots of gymnastics trying to solve a fundamentally more simple problem
of a text API vs ABI, hierarchy and maybe some object orientation. At
risk of ridicule, I think the AIX ODM was the best planned and
executed take on all that :)
Regards,
On Sat, Sep 30, 2017 at 8:17 AM, Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote:
Warner Losh:
It's an abundance of caution thing. This code had security problems in the
past, we're not 100% sure that we've killed all the issues, though we
believe we have.
====
And if there isn't anyone who's actively interested in the
code, willing to dig in to clean it up and make security
issues less likely, deal with multiprocessing matters, and
so on, that's a perfectly reasonable stance.
I think it's an unfortunate result, and I wonder how much
of it comes from a cultural view that sysctl >> /proc.
(Recall how Ken and Dennis originally resisted Doug's push
for pipelines and filters, because--as Dennis once put it
in a talk--it just wasn't the way programs worked?)
But as someone who is sometimes credited with removing
more code than he wrote while working on the latter-day
Research kernel, it's hard for me to argue with the principle.
A lot of the code I tossed out was complicated stuff that
was barely used if used at all, and that nobody was willing
to step up to volunteer to maintain.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON