Re: Binary sysfs blobs

[Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org>]

On Tuesday, April 11, 2006 11:08 am, Pete Zaitcev wrote:
> Hi, Greg:
>
> I was reviewing some patches here and noticed (yes, only now noticed)
> that we have operations on binary blobs in fs/sysfs/bin.c. I thought
> it wasn't part of the deal for sysfs, with one value per file and so
> on. I suppose it's too late to debate now, but I have a couple of
> questions:
>
>  - Do you know of any conventions which allow to determine which file
>    is binary? Maybe the name starting with an underscore or something?

AFAIK there isn't any convention.  The PCI related files 
(/sys/bus/pci/devices/...) don't have a particular naming scheme for 
example.

>  - Is there a standing policy that reading from a sysfs file is not
>    altering a state of the corresponding hardware? This is not related
>    to blobs directly, but with people passing structs now, it's
> tempting to implement some extended protocols. I am concerned of
> stealing network packets by accident or something.

Nope, again if you access the PCI files you may end up programming the 
hardware in some way.  There may be other examples of this elsewhere, 
but I haven't looked.

Jesse