On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 14:32:48 -0700 (PDT)
"David S. Miller" [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Chris Wedgwood <redacted>
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 09:33:58 -0700

quoted

I thought the concensurs here was that because doing reliable atomic
updates of 64-bit values isn't possible on some (most?) 32-bit
architectures so we need additional locking to make this work which is
undesirable?  (It might even be a FAQ by now as this comes up fairly
often).

That's correct.

Also width of fields in /proc/net/dev can't change without potentially
breaking ABI of applications.