"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes: > Eric W. Biederman wrote: >>> >>> Agreed. *Furthermore*, if the number isn't in <linux/sysctl.h> it shouldn't >>> exist anywhere else, either. >> >> That would be a good habit. Feel free to send the patches to ensure that >> is so. >> >> I'm a practical fix it when it is in my way kind of guy ;) > > That's fine. However, I am wondering if there are things in <linux/sysctl.h> > which really doesn't need architectural numbers, i.e. which should be removed > from the binary interface. As a practical measure the 32bit hierarchical numeric namespace is extremely sparsely populated. So even if there are things that we never intend to export again it doesn't hurt to reserve the number for them so we don't confuse something that thought the number actually meant something. In the worst case we want to comment out the entry so we keep the number reserved even if we don't use it. To see if there are entries we are not currently using just requires going through the loop. <pseudo shell> For DEFINE in sysctl.h ; do if ! grep -r DEFINE /usr/src/linux/ ; then echo DEFINE not used. fi done </pseudo shell> Eric
