GSoC: registration of optional kernel features via sysctl: a question to the community

Ilya Bakulin webmaster at kibab.com
Wed Jun 9 08:33:28 UTC 2010


Hi hackers!

While discussing my project's implementation details with my mentor,
Alexander Leidinger, we've found that one of the ideas needs to be discussed with community,
to find out possible use cases.
That is, if it should be possible to spoof non-existing features. For
example, if currently running kernel doesn't support FreeBSD 5.0 compat
layer, "kern.features.compat_freebsd5" will be absent when querying 
features list. The question is -- are there any cases when we want
"kern.features.compat_freebsd5" be present? If some feature is not in
kernel, then presenting its existence to the userland is useless
and may be even harmful, if, for example, some application relies on this feature.
Or there are some scenarios where such cheat is useful?

-- 
Regards,
Ilya Bakulin
http://kibab.com
xmpp://kibab612@jabber.ru
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