Hello Jody (& All) ,

On Thu, 27 Nov 2008, Jody McIntyre wrote:

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 06:15:35PM +0100, Gabor Gombas wrote:

quoted

/proc contains a lot of legacy junk but nowadays the trend is that you
should not add new files under /proc that are not process-related.

Agreed.  I'm not proposing that at all.

quoted

Changing /proc/mdstat is IMHO out of question since it is part of the
user visible ABI and breaking that is a big no-no. So if you want all
info in a single file that pretty much leaves only debugfs.

AFAICT it was last changed on 2005-09-09 (appearing in 2.6.14).  This
suggests we can change it given a sufficiently good reason.

debugfs isn't a good idea since ordinary systems won't (or shouldn't)
have it mounted.  In case I wasn't clear: some of these statistics _are_
useful to administrators with sufficient RAID knowledge.  For example,
if "out of stripes" is large and you have lots of memory, increasing
stripe_cache_size will likely be useful.

Cheers,
Jody

 	Seems as if changing /proc/mdstat might be problematic for all the 
present tools that monitor status ,  of an array & the disks ,  using it .
 	Tho somewhere I remember seeing "howto extemd a /proc/..." saying 
something about always "add to the end of a line any new data" & "never insert 
-before- present lines in those files" .

 	That said ,  /sys might actually be a convenient structure to place a 
single file for these statistics .  Try asking the /sys maintainer .

 	But ,  I'd like to further suggest that the creation criteria for this 
file be a boot: time option Or of course the ubiquitous module can be installed .
 	Thus the file is not created with every boot unless grub/lilo configs 
are modified ,  but just when the 'System Manager' needs to take a look .

 	Just $.02 ,  Twyl ,  JimL
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| James   W.   Laferriere | System    Techniques | Give me VMS     |
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