On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 19:14:05 -0700 ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)
wrote:

NeilBrown [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:58:53 +0800 qing gu [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

This patch is used to dispense trace info when system boots with debug 
kernel. I have verified it on RHEL6.2 & SLES11.2. Both work fine.
In the failure case, system logs that:

    /Feb 21 19:33:55 nsgbj-216-137 kernel: sysctl_check_dir: failed: /dev  ref: /dev .7

.....

quoted

These lines were removed in November 2009 by Eric Biederman in
commit 894d2491153a9f8270dbed21175d06fde4eba6c7

So I'm not keen on adding them back without understanding the history.

Eric:  Do we need these after all?

For the main trunk no.  The .ctl_name field no longer exists.

kernel/binary_sysctl.c is used to provide backwards compatibility with
the old binary names.

There might be a point for doing something in -stable or someone's
enterprise kernel if some messed up set of backports were merged.

Eric

Thanks for the quick response Eric!!

Qing: It looks like this is not an issue in mainline.
  If you want to get something fixed in SLES or RHEL, I suggest you log an
  issue in the relevant bugzillas (though I just checked SLES11-SP2, and
  it doesn't mention sysctl_check_dir at all).

NeilBrown