The year-long effort to removal the [1]sysctl sentinel for clearing bloat from the kernel and allowing faster build times should be crossing the finish line in [2]Linux 6.10 .

This work is for [3]removing 64 bytes of bloat per array by getting rid of the extra last sysctl entry at the end of each array. Dropping the sysctl sentinel should also [4]lead to faster kernel build times .

As I wrote about a few weeks back, [5]dropping the sysctl sentinel bloat has been seeing various patches queued ahead of the Linux 6.10 merge window.

Now with the Linux 6.10 merge window upon us, Joel Granados of Samsung sent out the sysctl changes for v6.10 and explained:

"Removed sentinel elements from ctl_table structs in kernel/*

Removing sentinels in ctl_table arrays reduces the build time size and runtime memory consumed by ~64 bytes per array. Removals for net/, io_uring/, mm/, ipc/ and security/ are set to go into mainline through their respective subsystems making the next release the most likely place where the final series that removes the check for proc_name == NULL will land. This PR adds to removals already in arch/, drivers/ and fs/."

Hoorah! The work can be found in [6]this pull request .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/sysctl+sentinel

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.10

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.6-Sysctl-Cleaning

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-sysctl

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-610-Clears-Sentinel-Bloat

[6] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240516100239.grazwwcra43imjg3@joelS2.panther.com/