Re: [PATCH] Make modules work in Linus' tree on ARM

Luck, Tony
2003-08-14T17:43:04Z

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Russell King wrote:
>
>>After reviewing the /proc/kcore and kclist issues, I've decided that I'm
>>no longer prepared to even _think_ about supporting /proc/kcore on ARM -
>
>
> I suspect we should just remove it altogether.
>
> Does anybody actually _use_ /proc/kcore? It was one of those "cool
> feature" things, but I certainly haven't ever used it myself except for
> testing, and it's historically often been broken after various kernel
> infrastructure updates, and people haven't complained..

I only fixed it up because someone at SGI complained that
my ia64 kernel virtual space re-arrangements had broken it
(even more ... it had never been right for ia64).

Even now, it's still full of races (e.g. if you start gdb to
look at /proc/kcore, then load or unload modules).

Plus gdb doesn't really understand that kcore is a special
file, so it caches values (read "jiffies" twice and notice
that it doesn't change ... because gdb cached the read).

So don't mistake my recent activity fixing kcore for interest
in its continued existence.

-Tony Luck