Re: [PATCH] net: add sock_open() for unified socket creation

[Al Viro]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2026 at 04:06:31PM +0300, Alex Goltsev wrote:

> +/**
> + * sock_open - creates a socket (unified interface)
> + * @family: protocol family (AF_INET, ...)
> + * @type: communication type (SOCK_STREAM, ...)
> + * @protocol: protocol (0, ...)
> + * @res: new socket
> + * @sock_type: one of SOCK_USER, SOCK_KERN, or SOCK_LITE
> + *
> + * Unified entry point for all socket creation variants.
> + * SOCK_USER creates a userspace socket (via sock_create).
> + * SOCK_KERN creates a kernel socket (via sock_create_kern).
> + * SOCK_LITE creates a lightweight uninitialized socket (via sock_create_lite).
> + *
> + * Return: 0 on success, negative errno on failure. On failure @res is NULL.
> + */

What's the point (and why not make it inline, while we are at it)?

Are there really callers that would pass a non-constant value as the last argument,
and if so, what are they doing next?