On Tue, 3 May 2011, Mandeep Sandhu wrote:
so have proc/seq file been massively deprecated in favour of sysfs attribute files, then?
Yes, that happened about 8 years ago :)
No driver should ever add a proc file, it's that simple.
oh, i was aware that the preference was for sysfs attr files. i just didn't realize it was that stringent. thanks.
I think the 'strictness' comes from the fact the /proc system was heavily abused for dumping just about any info into it (in the early days 2.4 kernel, I think).
/proc was originally meant for putting 'process' specific info (thats why the name - proc) and not for device drivers. CMIIW.
sysfs is a dedicated place for device drivers to export info to userland.
and i can accept that. i'm still going to cover (briefly) how /proc files work simply because there's a lot of them and i don't see them going away any time soon, but i'll emphasize that they are a bad thing for new drivers. rday p.s. on that note, of course, i'm interested in really simple examples of drivers that create increasingly complex collections of sysfs attr files. i *really* like to explain stuff like this by being able to point at existing drivers in the tree. -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca Twitter: http://twitter.com/rpjday LinkedIn: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday ========================================================================