linux/Documentation/sysctl
Henrik Austad a7ddcea58a Drop all 00-INDEX files from Documentation/
This is a respin with a wider audience (all that get_maintainer returned)
and I know this spams a *lot* of people. Not sure what would be the correct
way, so my apologies for ruining your inbox.

The 00-INDEX files are supposed to give a summary of all files present
in a directory, but these files are horribly out of date and their
usefulness is brought into question. Often a simple "ls" would reveal
the same information as the filenames are generally quite descriptive as
a short introduction to what the file covers (it should not surprise
anyone what Documentation/sched/sched-design-CFS.txt covers)

A few years back it was mentioned that these files were no longer really
needed, and they have since then grown further out of date, so perhaps
it is time to just throw them out.

A short status yields the following _outdated_ 00-INDEX files, first
counter is files listed in 00-INDEX but missing in the directory, last
is files present but not listed in 00-INDEX.

List of outdated 00-INDEX:
Documentation: (4/10)
Documentation/sysctl: (0/1)
Documentation/timers: (1/0)
Documentation/blockdev: (3/1)
Documentation/w1/slaves: (0/1)
Documentation/locking: (0/1)
Documentation/devicetree: (0/5)
Documentation/power: (1/1)
Documentation/powerpc: (0/5)
Documentation/arm: (1/0)
Documentation/x86: (0/9)
Documentation/x86/x86_64: (1/1)
Documentation/scsi: (4/4)
Documentation/filesystems: (2/9)
Documentation/filesystems/nfs: (0/2)
Documentation/cgroup-v1: (0/2)
Documentation/kbuild: (0/4)
Documentation/spi: (1/0)
Documentation/virtual/kvm: (1/0)
Documentation/scheduler: (0/2)
Documentation/fb: (0/1)
Documentation/block: (0/1)
Documentation/networking: (6/37)
Documentation/vm: (1/3)

Then there are 364 subdirectories in Documentation/ with several files that
are missing 00-INDEX alltogether (and another 120 with a single file and no
00-INDEX).

I don't really have an opinion to whether or not we /should/ have 00-INDEX,
but the above 00-INDEX should either be removed or be kept up to date. If
we should keep the files, I can try to keep them updated, but I rather not
if we just want to delete them anyway.

As a starting point, remove all index-files and references to 00-INDEX and
see where the discussion is going.

Signed-off-by: Henrik Austad <henrik@austad.us>
Acked-by: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Just-do-it-by: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Reviewed-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Acked-by: Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Acked-by: Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Mike Rapoport <rppt@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: [Almost everybody else]
Signed-off-by: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
2018-09-09 15:08:58 -06:00
..
abi.txt
fs.txt namei: allow restricted O_CREAT of FIFOs and regular files 2018-08-23 18:48:43 -07:00
kernel.txt ipc: reorganize initialization of kern_ipc_perm.seq 2018-08-22 10:52:51 -07:00
net.txt bpf, x86_32: add eBPF JIT compiler for ia32 2018-05-03 18:15:25 +02:00
README docs: Update binfmt_misc links 2017-10-03 15:23:38 -06:00
sunrpc.txt
user.txt Documentation/sysctl/user.txt: fix typo 2018-02-06 18:32:48 -08:00
vm.txt Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt: update __vm_enough_memory()'s path 2018-08-22 10:52:44 -07:00

Documentation for /proc/sys/		kernel version 2.2.10
	(c) 1998, 1999,  Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>

'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation
for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in
the source...'

Well, this documentation is written because some people either
don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't
have the time or knowledge to read the source code.

Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to
be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-)

==============================================================

Legal blurb:

As usual, there are two main things to consider:
1. you get what you pay for
2. it's free

The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of
this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you
screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't
feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you...

But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using
only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of
it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that
you're the last RTFMing person to screw up.

In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror
stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org>

Rik van Riel.

==============================================================

Introduction:

Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel
at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you
don't even need special tools to do it!
In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config
facilities:
- a running Linux system
- root access
- common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days)
- knowledge of what all those values mean

As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of
several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about
one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece
by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'.

The subdirs are about:
abi/		execution domains & personalities
debug/		<empty>
dev/		device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info)
fs/		specific filesystems
		filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning
		binfmt_misc <Documentation/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.rst>
kernel/		global kernel info / tuning
		miscellaneous stuff
net/		networking stuff, for documentation look in:
		<Documentation/networking/>
proc/		<empty>
sunrpc/		SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS)
vm/		memory management tuning
		buffer and cache management
user/		Per user per user namespace limits

These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more
or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd
really like to hear about it :-)