On Sat, 27 May 2000, Andries Brouwer wrote:
> On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 09:07:58PM -0400, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> > Look: there are other good reasons to change struct stat and I'm not too
> > happy about doing it in $BIGNUM steps, each resulting in new triple of
> > syscalls. If we are going to do that at all we'ld better do it at once.
>
> Yes, there are many reasons to change struct stat,
> and it is unlikely that we can do it all at once.
> But we only need 3 more syscalls once - they'll suffice forever.
>
> An old patch of mine (part of the "larger dev_t" suite) goes like
> ...
> +typedef int (*cp_stat_fn)(struct inode *, void *);
[snip]
Out of curiosity: what was Linus' reaction to that? 'Cause mine was to
crawl into the dark corner silently muttering "it's hopelessly, completely
wrong"... Damn, if we are going to go for something like that we'ld better
switch to ASCII and be done with that. It isn't different from multiple
syscalls - you are just passing the number through another register. All
the difference is that you are inviting said $BIGNUM of variants, loud
and clear. Moreover, it _still_ means changing the userland upon every
round of that game. So... what does it buy us? Frankly, I'ld rather see
the output in char * - yes, octal, space-separated, NUL-terminated ASCII
string. I suspect that you will lose more cycles on selecting the version
number compatible with the current kernel and shuffling the bits into
places anyway...
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat May 27 2000 - 10:20:19 EDT