Re: procfs bloat, syscall bloat [in reference to cpu affinity]

[Ingo Molnar]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Joe Korty wrote:

> So my rule is, services of the first kind, the ones that are simple
> and eternal, should be system calls, while the quirky second kind
> should be consigned soley to the proc fs.
>
> I feel that the cpu affinity services are of the first kind.  They are
> very simple, very conceptual services that have absolutely no tie in
> to any architecture other than it be SMP, and even on uniprocessors
> they reduce down gracefully to the null state. [...]

yep, agreed. Also, /proc might not be mounted in eg. a chroot environment.
(a number of security-conscious servers do this.) Or it might not be
mounted at all, for whatever reason.

> I am not against a proc interface per se, I would like a proc
> interface, especially for the reading of affinity values.  But in my
> view the system call interface should also exist and it should be the
> dominate way of communicating affinity to processes.

i'm not against the /proc interface either - on the contrary, i've picked
it when implementing /proc/irq/<NR>/smp_affinity.

	Ingo