Re: 2.1.118 Tons of oopes

Richard Gooch (rgooch@atnf.csiro.au)
Thu, 27 Aug 1998 07:25:34 +1000


David S. Miller writes:
> Date: Wed, 26 Aug 1998 22:32:44 +1000
> From: Richard Gooch <rgooch@atnf.csiro.au>
>
> OK, there is a reason to do it. But is the benefit really worth the
> breakage?
>
> Yes because your drivers will silently break anyways, god knows what
> lies at the next word at the end of the old file_operations structure
> in your non-source driver (maybe the first word of some other
> structure, maybe the first instruction of some function, who knows).

I didn't mention non-source drivers. To be clear: I'm talking about
drivers where the source is available to those who use it, yet not
shipped with the kernel. PCMCIA is just one example. There must be
many in-house drivers people have developed to work with some
specialised hardware they have built or bought. They have source code
access to these drivers of course.

> Perhaps you consider silent total failures acceptable.

Definately not! But if flush() was appended to the structure, then
people had only to recompile their drivers and all would be fine. So
there would be no silent failures in that scheme.

The other scenario is where people only have binary modules
available. These will break *either way* with structure changes.

So please explain where the benefit of placing flush() in the middle
is?

Regards,

Richard....

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