[PATCH] sysctl: reimplement the sysctl proc support

With this change the sysctl inodes can be cached and nothing needs to be done
when removing a sysctl table.

For a cost of 2K code we will save about 4K of static tables (when we remove
de from ctl_table) and 70K in proc_dir_entries that we will not allocate, or
about half that on a 32bit arch.

The speed feels about the same, even though we can now cache the sysctl
dentries :(

We get the core advantage that we don't need to have a 1 to 1 mapping between
ctl table entries and proc files.  Making it possible to have /proc/sys vary
depending on the namespace you are in.  The currently merged namespaces don't
have an issue here but the network namespace under /proc/sys/net needs to have
different directories depending on which network adapters are visible.  By
simply being a cache different directories being visible depending on who you
are is trivial to implement.

[akpm@osdl.org: fix uninitialised var]
[akpm@osdl.org: fix ARM build]
[bunk@stusta.de: make things static]
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sysctl.h b/include/linux/sysctl.h
index 9698ac3..8915049 100644
--- a/include/linux/sysctl.h
+++ b/include/linux/sysctl.h
@@ -930,8 +930,6 @@ extern struct ctl_table_header *sysctl_head_next(struct ctl_table_header *prev);
 extern void sysctl_head_finish(struct ctl_table_header *prev);
 extern int sysctl_perm(struct ctl_table *table, int op);
 
-extern void sysctl_init(void);
-
 typedef struct ctl_table ctl_table;
 
 typedef int ctl_handler (ctl_table *table, int __user *name, int nlen,