On Wed Mar 08, 2000 at 10:14:26PM +0100, Guest section DW wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 08, 2000 at 08:38:32AM -0700, Erik Andersen wrote:
>
> > ... minimalist replacements for most of the utilities
> >
> > This patch provides 3 device drivers: devps, devmtab, and devmodules.
>
> For a minimal system devmtab is not necessary.
Of course. My goal wasn't to define what somebody's embedded system is
supposed to, or not supposed to, include. Leave that to the system integrators.
The Linux Router project (busybox based) happens to include lsmod. Other
embedded systems don't need such things.
That is why each of the aforementioned device drivers can independently be
turned on, off, or made into a module. Don't want it? Turn it off.
Mostly I added devmodules as an afterthought since it was simple enough to
write and it further demonstrated my general ideas:
1) the info in /proc can be easily exported via separate device drivers,
one device driver for each subsystem
2) stuff exported from the kernel should provide a machine readable
interface (in this case via an ioctl).
3) If appropriate, stuff exported from the kernel should also provide a
human readable interface (in this case provided via 'cat /dev/modules')
4) That I could make busybox (which covers a large chunk of user space)
work without needing /proc.
5) that by doing this, the final system gets smaller.
This is not a final solution to the evils of /proc, but I think it is either a
step in the right direction, or at least a stepping stone towards the right
direction.
-Erik
--
Erik B. Andersen Web: http://www.xmission.com/~andersen/
email: andersee@debian.org
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