Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 1 Jan 1999 12:53:31 -0800 (PST) | From | Linus Torvalds <> | Subject | Re: bogous binfmt_misc patch in 2.2.0-pre1 |
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On Fri, 1 Jan 1999, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > Ok. But I hope you wouldn't mind inserting into binfmt_misc something that > does: > > #ifndef CONFIG_PROC_FS > #error You really need /proc support for binfmt_misc. Please reconfigure! > #endif
Sure, that makes the error much more obvious. Consider it done.
> About why not having /proc: According to Alan's buglist, there are some > issues meaning that you don't want /proc if you can consider your users > hostile (for example students on a university computer). Dummy-functions for > config_proc_fs will cure this ofcourse.
It's not about not having /proc - although in a hostile environment I'd still suggest using a standard configuration and just not _mount_ it, or preferably mount it in a protected place so that root can still get the "ps" output, for example.
It's about modularity: if somebody doesn't want to have /proc filesysystem support, we should NOT have to know about that decision in other places all over the map. We should NOT have to have
#ifdef CONFIG_PROC_FS
inside drivers/scsi/fdomain.c - do you see my point?
So what I suggested as the real fix is to leave the internal /proc interfaces there even if /proc doesn't actually exist: that way, when somebody disables /proc in the config, everything else will still happily compile as if it was there, it just won't do anything.
Yes, it might cause a few unnecessary functions to be compiled that aren't actually ever used and thus wasting a few hundred bytes of memory, but I'd _much_ prefer a clean kernel that doesn't have to worry about spurious config options all over the place.
Linus
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