linux-kernel - Re: Linux 3.3-rc4

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Message-ID: <CA+55aFxkbsZN3yG6d9DPGiXmiuX-wOURJcC0hAUN3Qbykv1UhQ@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:43:14 -0800
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Thomas Meyer <thomas@...3r.de>, Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>
Cc:	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Linux 3.3-rc4

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 5:42 AM, Thomas Meyer <thomas@...3r.de> wrote:
>
> 2.) while debugging above issue: I did find an minor bug in sys_poll() - nobody did take care of my proposed patch: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/9/24/35

Ok, so I started out forward-porting that patch to current -git
(trivial: it's just that the system call tables are differently
generated now), but the more I look at it, the more I suspect that we
should perhaps just globally fix "sys_poll()" to have the timeout
argument be 'int'.

Because that *is* the standard user interface (just do "man 2 poll"),
and while all of the git history (and all of the BK history) we've had
it as "long", I suspect we should just fix it.

So I suspect the correct patch is just as attached instead: make
sys_poll() just take an "int timeout". Any user who tried to use a
long value would already have got truncated by glibc - I just checked.

Of course, there is a remote possibility that somebody might not use
glibc, and have used "poll()" with the raw system call interface, and
depended on using a 64-bit "long timeout" on 64-bit architectures.

But quite frankly, that sounds rather unlikely in the extreme.

Comments? If we do this, and somebody actually reports that they use a
64-bit timeout, we could always go back to the broken 'long' argument,
and take your patch to fix the compat case.

                  Linus

View attachment "patch.diff" of type "text/x-patch" (1706 bytes)