On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 12:24:12PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > Let's remove /dev/kmem, which is unused and obsolete. > > I grabbed these. Silently - the cc list is amazing ;) > > I was wondering if it would be better to permanently disable /dev/kmem > in Kconfig along with a comment "if you really want this thing then > email peeps@places with a very good reason why". Let that ride for a > year or three then blam. > > But this is so much more attractive, and it certainly sounds like it's > worth any damage it might cause. > > We do tend to think about distros. I bet there are a number of weird > embedded type systems using /dev/kmem - it's amazing what sorts of > hacks those people will put up with the get something out the door. > But those systems tend to carry a lot of specialized changes anyway, so > they can just add "revert David's patch" to their pile. > I wonder if we should have the opposite of driver/staging and call it outgoing, with a big thank you to the users and developers and also to indicate this feature will be removed in the next (few) merge(s) cycles. I guess not all code can be accumulated under a single hierarchy. May not be worth the effort, just thinking out loud. Balbir Singh
