[PATCH 2/5] powerpc: proc_device_tree remove and update functions

[Dave C Boutcher]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 09:43:20AM +1100, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-01-11 at 22:32 +0000, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Wednesday 11 January 2006 21:50, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > > I think we should move to a filesystem instead. It should be fairly
> > > trivial (look at sun's openpromfs for example)
> > 
> > openpromfs predates most of libfs, which means it is a lot more
> > complicated than necessary already, and it doesn't fit the powerpc
> > representation of device_node very well.
> 
> Yeah, well, it was just an example ;) In fact, if you think it's too
> complicated, then what is simple ? :) (openpromfs looks trivial enough).
> 
> One of the big thing we want is to stop eating loads of memory on
> machines with gazillion nodes (typically big memory machines have
> gazillion of /memory@* nodes) among others. We want dentries & inodes to
> be created on the fly and purged automatically.

Actually, from just having swam around in the code for a while, I think
the procfs part is less problematic than the way we deal with the device
tree in the kernel.  The whole "get_property() returning a no-lifetime
pointer to some data" part is more of an architecture issue than the
userland filesystem part.  But changing that is going to be a mess.

-- 
Dave Boutcher