DRMFS Pseudo File-System Proposed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DRMFS Pseudo File-System Proposed

Intel developers are proposing the introduction of a new pseudo file-system intended as a better fit for Direct Rendering Manager drivers rather than the mix of sysfs/debugfs usage currently used...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DRMFS-RFC-DRM-File-System

[FireBurn]

And it was quickly shot down by another more prominent Intel developer and a reminder that the old interfaces will still need to be maintained

[bitman]

Oh yey one more sysfs. Its cool until you start parsing process information as text. Then it gets real ugly. That is one thing i like about win32 - it has an actual api for getting stuff out of OS.

[ssokolow]

Oh yey one more sysfs. Its cool until you start parsing process information as text. Then it gets real ugly. That is one thing i like about win32 - it has an actual api for getting stuff out of OS.

But, conversely, there's no stable kernel ABI, so truly static binaries aren't feasible, and Microsoft doesn't just grant a blanket "everyone can do it" license to redistribute the runtime DLLs outside of their redist bundles.

What we really need is Linux's ABI stability guarantees with a better serialization-deserialization story for things not important enough to merit being syscalls.

[cj.wijtmans]

i hope this gets trashed on really hard. What is wrong with sysfs

[ldo17]

Oh yey one more sysfs. Its cool until you start parsing process information as text. Then it gets real ugly. That is one thing i like about win32 - it has an actual api for getting stuff out of OS.

The nice thing about the text info is that I can use any tool that can handle text to look at info from sysfs.

For example, our local community centre was given a bunch of old PCs. All came with Windows, of course. I try to find out how many CPU cores a machine has--OK, Windows shows four. But are they four real cores, or just hyperthreaded? Can’t say. But boot into Linux (which we put on after wiping Windows anyway), and I can see from looking at the /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpun/topology/{thread,thread_siblings} files that the machine has only two real cores, each with two threads.

Why is it so hard to get this info out of Windows?

[bitman]

The nice thing about the text info is that I can use any tool that can handle text to look at info from sysfs.

For example, our local community centre was given a bunch of old PCs. All came with Windows, of course. I try to find out how many CPU cores a machine has--OK, Windows shows four. But are they four real cores, or just hyperthreaded? Can’t say. But boot into Linux (which we put on after wiping Windows anyway), and I can see from looking at the /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpun/topology/{thread,thread_siblings} files that the machine has only two real cores, each with two threads.

Why is it so hard to get this info out of Windows?

That is a fair point, however text being ONLY way to get that info is even more idiotic than c api being the only way. After all that info is more useful in something that is not a shellscript.

[ldo17]

... text being ONLY way to get that info is even more idiotic than c api being the only way.

You want a C API? Here, have one.