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-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt36
1 files changed, 23 insertions, 13 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt
index 5d1335faec2..b35a64b82f9 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/sysfs.txt
@@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ sysfs - _The_ filesystem for exporting kernel objects.
Patrick Mochel <mochel@osdl.org>
Mike Murphy <mamurph@cs.clemson.edu>
-Revised: 15 July 2010
+Revised: 16 August 2011
Original: 10 January 2003
@@ -39,10 +39,12 @@ userspace. Top-level directories in sysfs represent the common
ancestors of object hierarchies; i.e. the subsystems the objects
belong to.
-Sysfs internally stores the kobject that owns the directory in the
-->d_fsdata pointer of the directory's dentry. This allows sysfs to do
-reference counting directly on the kobject when the file is opened and
-closed.
+Sysfs internally stores a pointer to the kobject that implements a
+directory in the sysfs_dirent object associated with the directory. In
+the past this kobject pointer has been used by sysfs to do reference
+counting directly on the kobject whenever the file is opened or closed.
+With the current sysfs implementation the kobject reference count is
+only modified directly by the function sysfs_schedule_callback().
Attributes
@@ -60,7 +62,7 @@ values of the same type.
Mixing types, expressing multiple lines of data, and doing fancy
formatting of data is heavily frowned upon. Doing these things may get
-you publically humiliated and your code rewritten without notice.
+you publicly humiliated and your code rewritten without notice.
An attribute definition is simply:
@@ -68,7 +70,7 @@ An attribute definition is simply:
struct attribute {
char * name;
struct module *owner;
- mode_t mode;
+ umode_t mode;
};
@@ -106,12 +108,12 @@ static DEVICE_ATTR(foo, S_IWUSR | S_IRUGO, show_foo, store_foo);
is equivalent to doing:
static struct device_attribute dev_attr_foo = {
- .attr = {
+ .attr = {
.name = "foo",
.mode = S_IWUSR | S_IRUGO,
- .show = show_foo,
- .store = store_foo,
},
+ .show = show_foo,
+ .store = store_foo,
};
@@ -208,9 +210,9 @@ Other notes:
is 4096.
- show() methods should return the number of bytes printed into the
- buffer. This is the return value of snprintf().
+ buffer. This is the return value of scnprintf().
-- show() should always use snprintf().
+- show() should always use scnprintf().
- store() should return the number of bytes used from the buffer. If the
entire buffer has been used, just return the count argument.
@@ -229,7 +231,7 @@ A very simple (and naive) implementation of a device attribute is:
static ssize_t show_name(struct device *dev, struct device_attribute *attr,
char *buf)
{
- return snprintf(buf, PAGE_SIZE, "%s\n", dev->name);
+ return scnprintf(buf, PAGE_SIZE, "%s\n", dev->name);
}
static ssize_t store_name(struct device *dev, struct device_attribute *attr,
@@ -368,3 +370,11 @@ int driver_create_file(struct device_driver *, const struct driver_attribute *);
void driver_remove_file(struct device_driver *, const struct driver_attribute *);
+Documentation
+~~~~~~~~~~~~~
+
+The sysfs directory structure and the attributes in each directory define an
+ABI between the kernel and user space. As for any ABI, it is important that
+this ABI is stable and properly documented. All new sysfs attributes must be
+documented in Documentation/ABI. See also Documentation/ABI/README for more
+information.