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.
  

I have to think that providing information useful to a subset of users, 
while possibly breaking existing tools, is going to be a hard sell and 
probably indefensible, since your new stuff could as well go in a new 
file in /sys or even debugfs. I would rather not see you mix policy with 
the technical features of these patches. I'd rather not see you do 
anything which makes my fragile perl scripts break, either. ;-)

I think this is a step in the right direction, tuning an array is always 
time consuming, and I suspect that many of us settle for "better" rather 
than "optimal" just for that reason.

-- 
Bill Davidsen [off-list ref]
  "Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
  be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark