On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
>
> There's precedent for binary data in sysfs -- pci config space is one.
In general, if the data has no semantic meaning (ie it's just a blob), and
there really is some point to exporting it, it should be exported as a
binary blob. There's no point in doing some random "ASCII conversion" if
the data doesn't have any known semantics. Bytes? Words? Longwords?
Byteorder? It's simply not a sensible operation, and the only sane
interface is to just read a binary blob with the raw data.
That's true in general of PCI config space. Of course, _some_ parts of PCI
config space do indeed have meaning, so you'll find the "device" and
"vendor" and other things like that as separate nodes in /sysfs with ASCII
representations. So sometimes you may have mixtures (but it would be
stupid to try to "remove" the semantic data from the blob - then it would
turn into a _true_ monster).
So it's not like binary blobs are not allowed. In general, the rule should
be:
- all independent values should show up as independent files (never mix
stuff up that you don't need to)
- anything with semantic meaning should have the appropriate semantic
textual format (ie formatted ASCII, not just raw data).
The _goal_ is that you can look at sysfs with a file manager, and the
results should make sense.
Linus
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