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Message-ID: <4AD525B3.2070906@zytor.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:13:23 -0700
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
To: Roland McGrath <roland@...hat.com>
CC: Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>,
linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Oren Laadan <orenl@...columbia.edu>,
serue@...ibm.com, "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@...ssion.com>,
Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@...il.com>,
Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@...nvz.org>,
Andrew Morton <akpm@...l.org>, torvalds@...ux-foundation.org,
mikew@...gle.com, mingo@...e.hu,
Nathan Lynch <nathanl@...tin.ibm.com>, arnd@...db.de,
peterz@...radead.org, Louis.Rilling@...labs.com,
kosaki.motohiro@...fujitsu.com, randy.dunlap@...cle.com,
linux-api@...r.kernel.org,
Containers <containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
sukadev@...ibm.com
Subject: Re: [RFC][v8][PATCH 0/10] Implement clone3() system call
On 10/13/2009 04:53 PM, Roland McGrath wrote:
>> My only concern is the support of 64-bit clone flags on 32-bit architectures.
>
> Oy. I didn't realize there was serious consideration of having more than
> 32 flags. IMHO it would be a bad choice, since they could only be used via
> clone3. Having high-bit flags work in clone on 64-bit machines but not on
> 32-bit machines just seems like a wrongly confusing way for things to be.
> If any high-bits flags are constrained even on 64-bit machines to uses in
> clone3 calls for sanity purposes, then it seems questionable IMHO to have
> them be more flags in the same u64 at all.
>
> Since all new features will be via this struct, various new kinds of things
> could potentially be done by other new struct fields independent of flags.
> But that would of course require putting enough reserved fields in now and
> requiring that they be zero-filled now in anticipation of such future uses,
> which is not very pleasant either.
>
> In short, I guess I really am saying that "clone_flags_high" (or
> "more_flags" or something) does seem better to me than any of the
> possibilities for having more than 32 CLONE_* in the current flags word.
>
Overall it seems sane to:
a) make it an actual 3-argument call;
b) make the existing flags a u32 forever, and make it a separate
argument;
c) any new expansion can be via the struct, which may want to have
an "c3_flags" field first in the structure.
-hpa
--
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel. I don't speak on their behalf.
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