[PATCH/RFC v1 0/2] Human readable performance event description in sysfs

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 15:16 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-01-20 at 15:09 +0100, Michał Nazarewicz wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:01:20 +0100, Peter Zijlstra <peterz at infradead.org> wrote:
> > > It seems to me userspace might care about the exact platform they're
> > > running on.
> > 
> > In my humble opinion, user space should never care about platform it's
> > running on.  Interfaces provided by kernel should suffice to implement
> > abstraction layer between user space and hardware.  If we abandon that
> > we're back in DOS times.  But hey, again, that's just my opinion.
> 
> Well, you're completely right. But the often sad reality is that perfect
> abstraction is either impossible or prohibitively expensive.

And then there is the simple matter of knowing what kind of box it is
without having to resort to a screwdriver or worse.