Re: [PATCH 0/3] Transition /proc/cpuinfo -> sysfs

[Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 03:41:17PM -0700, Deepak Saxena wrote:

 > - Do we want to standardize on a set of attributes that all CPUs
 >   must provide to sysfs? bogomips, L1 cache size/type/sets/assoc (when
 >   available), L2 cache (L3..L4), etc?

For x86 at least, this can be entirely decoded in userspace using
the /dev/cpu/x/cpuid interface. See x86info for example of this.

 > - Instead of dumping the "flags" field, should we just dump cpu
 >   registers as hex strings and let the user decode (as the comment
 >   for the x86_cap_flags implies.

ditto.

As these require arch specific parsers anyway, I don't think it makes
too much sense making a kernel abstraction trying to make them all
look 'the same', and if it can be done in userspace, why bother ?

The only other concern I have is the further expansion of sysfs with
no particular gain over what we currently have. The sysfs variant
*will* use more unreclaimable RAM than the proc version.

/proc/cpuinfo has done well enough for us for quite a number of years
now, what makes it so urgent to kill it now that sysfs is the
virtual-fs-de-jour ?

		Dave