Hi Olof, On 4/8/19 12:29 PM, Olof Johansson wrote:
Sorry to be late at the party with this kind of feedback, but I find the whole ".tar.gz in procfs" to be an awkward solution, especially if there's expected to be userspace tooling that depends on this long-term. Wouldn't it be more convenient to provide it in a standardized format such that you won't have to take an additional step, and always have it in a known location? Something like: - Pseudo-filesystem, that can just be mounted under /sys/kernel/headers or something (similar to debugfs or /proc/device-tree). - Exporting something like a squashfs image instead, allowing loopback mounting of it (or by providing a pseudo-/dev entry for it), again allowing direct export of the contents and avoiding the extracted directory from being out of sync with currently running kernel. Having to copy and extract the tarball is the most awkward step, IMHO. I also find the waste of kernel memory for it to be an issue, but given that it can be built as a module I guess that's the obvious solution for those who care about memory consumption.
One of the things I pointed out earlier in the thread is that /proc/config.gz has already set a precedent as to the interface for this sort of artifact. It's a plain compressed file and it's directly accessible from toplevel /proc. From a consistency perspective there's an idiomatic angle to some sort of "/proc/kheaders.gz".
In some offline discussions I was also told that squashfs (I'm no expert of it) required special user-space tools and had some security issues.
Cheers, -- Karim Yaghmour CEO - Opersys inc. / www.opersys.com http://twitter.com/karimyaghmour
