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SubjectRe: /proc/pci unknown devices
On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Gerard Roudier wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Oct 1999, Dan Hollis wrote:
> > Which programs depend on /proc/pci ?
> User's habits. ;-)
> You seem to want to kill /proc/pci.

Yup ;)

> At a rough approximate, such a table without any king of space
> optimization should not be greater than 16KB. Even twice this value does
> not look unacceptable bloat to me, given the actual size of any kernel
> ready to run for common configurations and common bloatwares we are using
> from userland (Netscape, Emacs, Gcc, Perl, Bash and others as the Java
> monstrosity really donnot care of sparing these 16KB of memory you seem to
> worry about).

For those running embedded pci systems the extra 35kb of wasted text
strings is not really nice. Especially if you are going to have to ROM the
image. For some users this could make the difference between kernel too
large for lilo, and one that works.

I thought we were trying to avoid M$-thinking, or is redmond starting to
influence developers, "16kb here, 32kb there, it won't matter".

At the very least this should be a kernel option,
"legacy /proc/pci (obsolete)". Taking this choice out of users hands is
*bad*.

> If you really want to spare this fiew memory, may-be this information
> should be made available as a data file than can be read from the
> kernel, from a userland tool, and from some library function as well.

Why does the *kernel* need access to descriptive text strings of devices
in order to function?

This is purely for user convenience, hence it can be in userspace with
pciutils.

Besides, lspci is 100,000x more verbose and useful than 'cat /proc/pci'.
Is "user habit to type 'cat /proc/pci'" a good enough reason to keep it?

-Dan


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