On Wed, 29 Jul 2026 at 08:31, Steven Rostedt <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > > Honestly, I would love to get rid of it as today ftrace has proven to be
> > > rather stable. But as it is a user space ABI, I'm not sure what will break
> > > if we do. I wonder if we just make it a nop, and print a message to dmesg
> > > saying:
> > >
> > > "ftrace_enabled no longer does anything. Please report if you need it
> > > to."
> > >
> > > ?
> >
> > Thanks Steven, if you and/or other community members would approve such
> > approach I would happily do this instead for a few reasons -
>
> It's actually if Linus is OK with this approach.
The rule is always the same, and I don't understand why there's any
discussion about it because it's been stated a million times: we can
try to make any ABI changes at all, and what matters is whether it
breaks somebodys setup.
If people rely on old behavior, it can't change. And if people don't,
nobody cares. It really is that simple. That is literally the
DEFINITION of "don't break user space".
Whether something is user-*VISIBLE* in theory is entirely immaterial
except in the sense of "be careful, this needs testing and may have to
be reverted". So user-visibility isn't a "don't do it", it's a "do it
carefully, and knowing that you may have to revert immediately if
somebody complains".
So changing user-visible things is potentially a lot of wasted effort,
and needs loving care and follow-up.
So everybody should typically avoid changing user-visible things
because it's potentially painful and developer-intensive, but not
because it can't be done.
All that matters is whether real user workloads regress.
And please make sure that any changed behaviour is really obvious, so
that people don't spend lots of time chasing down *why* something
broke. A kernel printk is generally way too subtle - and no, the
tracing "make the printk extra ugly with crazy ASCII barfics" model is
not an improvement.
It might be better to actually return an error to user space so that
users can see that setting ftrace_enabled to zero failed and it would
show up in user logs. kernel developers may think that kernel logs are
important, but users seldom even think about them. Of course, that can
then cause even worse regressions, so there's a balance here.
End result: don't do user visible changes unless you really really
care. And then you spend the extra effort.
Linus
