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Date: Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:50:37 -0800
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Earl Chew <echew@ixiacom.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
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        <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Support single byte reads from integers published in
 procfs by kernel/sysctl.c
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On Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:47:51 -0800
Earl Chew <echew@ixiacom.com> wrote:

> > Rereading different bytes of the integer multiple times when the integer
> > may be changing does not seem like a reasonable implementation.
> 
> Yes. I agree with you. I shall re-work the patch as per your suggestion.

Yes, this is a bug and procfs should support byte-at-a-time reading of these
strings.  And yes, they are strings!  Of digits.

We fixed an instance of this in procfs a while ago (maybe a year ago?).
But I forget where it was.  It is surprising that a bug of this nature
survived so long.