Re: I request inclusion of SAS Transport Layer and AIC-94xx into the kernel

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2005 at 02:14:50PM -0600, Andrew Patterson wrote:
> > > Note that a sysfs implementation has problems.  Binary attributes are
> > > discouraged/not-allowed.
> > 
> > I've never heard that.  Is this similar to the argument
> > "The sysfs tree would be too deep?"
> 
> >From Documentation/filesystes/sysfs.txt
> 
> "Attributes should be ASCII text files, preferably with only one value
> per file. It is noted that it may not be efficient to contain only
> value per file, so it is socially acceptable to express an array of
> values of the same type.
> 
> Mixing types, expressing multiple lines of data, and doing fancy
> formatting of data is heavily frowned upon. Doing these things may get
> you publically humiliated and your code rewritten without notice."
> 
> My understanding is that sysfs is meant to be human-readable.  I do not
> know if this is a hard and fast rule or just a convention.  Configfs is
> probably a better fit at least for writeable attributes, but may not be
> cooked yet.

There's precedent for binary data in sysfs -- pci config space is one.