linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v14] x86, mce: Add memcpy

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Date:	Fri, 11 Mar 2016 14:14:44 -0800
From:	Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@...el.com>
To:	Tony Luck <tony.luck@...il.com>
Cc:	Mika Penttilä <mika.penttila@...tfour.com>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>,
	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v14] x86, mce: Add memcpy_mcsafe()

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 2:10 PM, Tony Luck <tony.luck@...il.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 11:37 AM, Luck, Tony <tony.luck@...el.com> wrote:
>>> But you return 0 == false for success and 1 == true for failure.
>>
>> Aaargh!  -ETOOMUCHSHELLSCRIPTPROGRAMMING
>>
>> -Tony
>
> Options to fix this:
> 1) Just change the comments in the code.
>      This seems like it would confuse people as I thing most people
>      would expect the "true" return to mean the copy succeeded.
> 2) Reverse the return values.
>      Better that option 1 - but doesn't leave scope to return a count
>      if some future user does want to know where the copy failed.
> 3) Change the return type back from "bool" to "int"
>      0 == success, non-zero == fail (with option to put the non-copied
> byte count in later).
> 4) Something else
>

You could return 0 for success and -EIO for failure (positive value
for 'location' if that support ever resurfaces).

That would at least let me drop the ternary conversion I have in
memcpy_from_pmem() [1] to convert bool to an error code.

[1]: https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/8559521/