To: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       earl_chew@agilent.com, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
       Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>
References: <20090622172818.GB14673@hmsreliant.think-freely.org>
	<20090625163050.d6a71a13.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
	<20090626104804.GA7337@hmsreliant.think-freely.org>
	<20090626092001.32e35e17.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
	<20090628193112.GA6760@one.firstfloor.org>
	<20090628135235.10f9b153.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
	<m163egt524.fsf@fess.ebiederm.org>
	<20090628214855.GC6760@one.firstfloor.org>
From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:06:25 -0700
In-Reply-To: <20090628214855.GC6760@one.firstfloor.org> (Andi Kleen's message of "Sun\, 28 Jun 2009 23\:48\:55 +0200")
Message-ID: <m1hby0qahq.fsf@fess.ebiederm.org>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH] exec: Make do_coredump more robust and safer when using pipes in core_pattern
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Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org> writes:

>> Andrew should I toss all 100 or so patches over the wall to you
>> and your -mm tree?  Or should I maintain a public git tree based
>> at 2.6.31-rc1?  Get it into linux-next and ask Linus to pull it when
>> the merge window comes?
>
> What do these 100 odd patches do exactly? 

Mostly a fine grained killing of ctl_name, and strategy.

> I think DEFINE_SYSCTL()/ELF section would be the correct direction to go
> for all global variable sysctls.

Perhaps.  I don't know how those data structures interact with
what we have in kernel and in modules.

> Then the binary sysctls could be handled by a global table
> in a separate file like you described

Getting the binary sysctl crud out of the core path should
happen first.  That is just a handful of patches.

> For dynamically generated sysctls (relatively rare but there) 
> the current interfaces are not great, but could be probably kept.

Things like register_sysctl_path can be greatly improved.  Now
that we don't have to worry about the binary paths.

> That all doesn't really need 100 patches though.

If you want the patches to be small enough to be human readable it
takes a lot.  If you want the patches to be CC'able to the appropriate
maintainers and you don't want to require them to weed through a bunch of
irrelevant code it takes a lot.

Typos are a real danger in an operation like this.

Eric
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