Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932255AbWCBRbB (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Mar 2006 12:31:01 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932260AbWCBRbB (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Mar 2006 12:31:01 -0500 Received: from fmr17.intel.com ([134.134.136.16]:15570 "EHLO orsfmr002.jf.intel.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932255AbWCBRa7 convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Mar 2006 12:30:59 -0500 x-mimeole: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.5.7226.0 Content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Subject: RE: 2.6.16rc5 'found' an extra CPU. Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2006 12:30:42 -0500 Message-ID: X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: Thread-Topic: 2.6.16rc5 'found' an extra CPU. Thread-Index: AcY98xyYsEBIYxmsS6qFbHFOYNqewQAKx5Fg From: "Brown, Len" To: "Andi Kleen" Cc: "Dave Jones" , "Raj, Ashok" , , , "Mochel, Patrick" X-OriginalArrivalTime: 02 Mar 2006 17:30:45.0929 (UTC) FILETIME=[09FF9190:01C63E1F] Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1398 Lines: 33 >On Thursday 02 March 2006 06:49, Brown, Len wrote: > >> I'm afraid that even after we get this stuff out of /proc >> and into sysfs where it belongs, we'll have to leave >/proc/acpi around >> for a while b/c unfortunately people are under the impression >> that the path names there actually mean something and >> they can actually count on them -- which they can't. > >But they should. Once you provide an interface here you >have to provide it essentially forever. Or at least if you really >change it use a very long deprecation period, but even that >is a bad thing to do to users. The 4-character strings in the path names (eg "CPU0") are _arbitrary_. They come _directly_ from the BIOS source code and depend on whatever mood the BIOS writer was in that day. For this reason, users _can't_ count on these strings and these path-names being consistent across platforms. Yes, this is a horrible design. Yes, I want to delete it in favor of sysfs as soon as possible, Patrick has a big patch set in development to get that ball rolling. Yes, users kick and scream whenever you change something they can see and thus it takes a long time. -Len - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/