kernel panics at google

[James Manning]

[ Tuesday, January 25, 2000 ] Riley Williams wrote:
> Based on what I've seen recently, what is wrong with the idea of
> having /proc files specifying a single value measured in some unit
> actually state the unit when it's read, along the lines of...
> 
>  Q> # cat /proc/sys/kernel/panic
>  Q> 0 seconds
>  Q> # echo 90 > /proc/sys/kernel/panic
>  Q> # cat /proc/sys/kernel/panic
>  Q> 90 seconds
>  Q> #
> 
> I appreciate that any programs making use of these files would need to
> be checked to see if they work with the new format, but other than
> that, are there any problems with doing this?

People start trying to do things like 
	echo 1 minute > /proc/sys/kernel/panic
and expecting it to work :)  After all, the whole idea of the interface
is it looks/acts like a small text file, right?

Seriously, though, if you are dealing with the files in /proc you're
typically doing so for a reason and while many/most cases have obvious
units, the ones that don't (like this) are easy enough to look up.

I'd rather see better Documentation/ entries covering the /proc entries
as they get added rather than bloat the kernel with such code.

James
-- 
Miscellaneous Engineer --- IBM Netfinity Performance Development

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