[RFC PATCH 0/1] sysctl: remove CONFIG_SYSCTL, it just mirrors CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL

Oleg Nesterov posted 1 patch 2 days, 9 hours ago
[RFC PATCH 0/1] sysctl: remove CONFIG_SYSCTL, it just mirrors CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL
Posted by Oleg Nesterov 2 days, 9 hours ago
Andrew, Eric, et al,

To me it is a bit annoying/confusing to see both CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL and
CONFIG_SYSCTL in the source code (they are the same thing), but...

Does it make any sense to try to suggest this patch for -mm tree?

It is hopefully trivial (generated by 2 perl one-liners) but touches 170 files.
So far I don't even CC maintainers, the output of get_maintainer.pl is huge.

Alternatively, we could kill CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL in favour of CONFIG_SYSCTL.
This would result in a much smaller patch, but I am not sure if it is "safe"
because CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL is user-visible in that it has a prompt in
fs/proc/Kconfig. But perhaps this is fine?

(either way we can make a couple more minor cleanups if we kill one of them).

Oleg.
Re: [RFC PATCH 0/1] sysctl: remove CONFIG_SYSCTL, it just mirrors CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL
Posted by Alexey Gladkov 2 days, 9 hours ago
On Wed, Jul 22, 2026 at 02:44:07PM +0200, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> Andrew, Eric, et al,
> 
> To me it is a bit annoying/confusing to see both CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL and
> CONFIG_SYSCTL in the source code (they are the same thing), but...
> 
> Does it make any sense to try to suggest this patch for -mm tree?
> 
> It is hopefully trivial (generated by 2 perl one-liners) but touches 170 files.
> So far I don't even CC maintainers, the output of get_maintainer.pl is huge.
> 
> Alternatively, we could kill CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL in favour of CONFIG_SYSCTL.
> This would result in a much smaller patch, but I am not sure if it is "safe"
> because CONFIG_PROC_SYSCTL is user-visible in that it has a prompt in
> fs/proc/Kconfig. But perhaps this is fine?
> 
> (either way we can make a couple more minor cleanups if we kill one of them).

After 61a47c1ad3a4 ("sysctl: Remove the sysctl system call"), we have no
other way to set sysctl values except through /proc/sys.

So it makes sense for me to remove the duplicates.

-- 
Rgrds, legion