On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 11:37:12AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
On Wednesday 07 September 2011 10:32:27 Dave Martin wrote:
Note that the hwcaps info in /proc/cpuinfo is generated from the same hwcaps word exposed via auxv so, for now, the information is identical.
I would normally rate parsing /proc/cpuinfo as being a bad idea, but /proc/cpuinfo is probably the only source of the part ID information, for now. This is a bit unfortunate, especially since the format of /proc/cpuinfo could change at some point in the future, but in practice it seems to have been pretty stable with respect to this particular piece of information.
We do try to keep any ABI stable, including /proc/cpuinfo. I would generally consider it a bug when it breaks.
Agreed, but there are occasional changes, such is rmk pulling out the cache configuration information when he considered it had become too unsustainable.
As a general rule, the more generic a piece of information in /proc/cpuinfo is, the less likely it is to break. The CPU part number seems pretty generic, so it should be fairly safe to refer to it.
Cheers ---Dave