Re: [PATCH] Use uname not sysctl to get the kernel revision

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 12, 2006 at 11:42:47AM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Unless a darn good reason for keeping it is found, sys_sysctl won't be
>> in the kernel several months from now.  And uname is faster by a large
>> margin than /proc.
>
> Um, if glibc is using sys_sysctl, then that's a pretty good reason.
> Once we remove it from the kernel, then people will be forced to
> upgrade glibc's before they can install a newer kernel.  Can we please
> give people some time for an version of glibc with this change to make
> it out to most deployed systems, first?  It's really annoying when
> it's not possible to install a stock kernel.org kernel on a system,
> and often upgrading glibc is not a trivial thing to do on a
> distribution userspace, especially if there is a concern for ISV
> compatibility.  (Especially if C++ code is involved, unfortunately.)

I agree.

The reason for stopping this is that sys_sysctl at that location
in glibc is unnecessary, we can use uname now.

Currently that usage by glibc gives false positives if we want
to warn users.

>> Right now because there has been a deprecated note in
>> "include/linux/sysctl.h" since 2003 people currently feel fine with
>> letting sys_sysctl code bit rot.  I am trying to resolve that
>> situation most likely by just updating the few stray pieces of user
>> space that care and then cutting out that chunk of kernel code.
>
> What we should do is what we've done in the past before removing a
> system call like this.  printk a deprecation warning no more than n
> times an hours with the process name using the deprecated interface.
> A deprecated note in a header isn't necessarily something which will
> be noticed by userspace programmers.  Heck, it isn't even in
> Documentation/feature-removal-schedule.txt yet.

I sent Andrew patches yesterday to put it in 
Documentation/feature-remove-schedule.txt, and to print a warning, and
to optionally compile out sys_sysctl. 

> If people want to remove it, let's please do this in an orderly
> fashion, and with ample warning that people besides kernel developers
> will actually *notice*.

I agree.  Part of that beyond the deprecated message is sending
patches to fixup the few remaining users and talking about it a lot
so even if someone doesn't run the kernels with deprecated message
they might notice something.

> 						- Ted
>
> P.S.  I happen to be one those developers who think the binary
> interface is not so bad, and for compared to reading from /proc/sys,
> the sysctl syscall *is* faster.  But at the same there, there really
> isn't anything where really does require that kind of speed, so that
> point is moot.  But at the same time, what is the cost of leaving
> sys_sysctl in the kernel for an extra 6-12 months, or even longer,
> starting from now?  

The core problem is enough people have read that depreciated warning
that the binary interface of kernel/sysctl.c is not being maintained
seriously.  So the code must move out of this half deprecated state.
Either to all of the way gone (preferably) or reinstated as an
interface that we are serious about maintaining.  Code that
bit rots and people don't care is a problem.

> Or if we going to remove parts of sysctl, can we at least keep enough
> there so that existing glibc systems don't break?

That is not a problem. glibc will happily fall back to reading
the values from /proc/sys/kernel/version if sysctl fails.  It
just makes more sense (to me at least) to use uname for
getting uname data.

Eric

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