sysctl: Add register_sysctl_paths function

There are a number of modules that register a sysctl table
somewhere deeply nested in the sysctl hierarchy, such as
fs/nfs, fs/xfs, dev/cdrom, etc.

They all specify several dummy ctl_tables for the path name.
This patch implements register_sysctl_path that takes
an additional path name, and makes up dummy sysctl nodes
for each component.

This patch was originally written by Olaf Kirch and
brought to my attention and reworked some by Olaf Hering.
I have changed a few additional things so the bugs are mine.

After converting all of the easy callers Olaf Hering observed
allyesconfig ARCH=i386, the patch reduces the final binary size by 9369 bytes.

.text +897
.data -7008

   text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
   26959310        4045899 4718592 35723801        2211a19 ../vmlinux-vanilla
   26960207        4038891 4718592 35717690        221023a ../O-allyesconfig/vmlinux

So this change is both a space savings and a code simplification.

CC: Olaf Kirch <okir@suse.de>
CC: Olaf Hering <olaf@aepfle.de>
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Daniel Lezcano <dlezcano@fr.ibm.com>
Cc: Cedric Le Goater <clg@fr.ibm.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sysctl.h b/include/linux/sysctl.h
index 4f5047df8a9e..3b6e2c9fbb2e 100644
--- a/include/linux/sysctl.h
+++ b/include/linux/sysctl.h
@@ -1059,7 +1059,15 @@ struct ctl_table_header
         struct completion *unregistering;
 };
 
+/* struct ctl_path describes where in the hierarchy a table is added */
+struct ctl_path {
+        const char *procname;
+        int ctl_name;
+};
+
 struct ctl_table_header *register_sysctl_table(struct ctl_table * table);
+struct ctl_table_header *register_sysctl_paths(const struct ctl_path *path,
+                                                struct ctl_table *table);
 
 void unregister_sysctl_table(struct ctl_table_header * table);
 int sysctl_check_table(struct ctl_table *table);