Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3a] ptrace: add _ptrace_may_access()

From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
To: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH 3/3a] ptrace: add _ptrace_may_access()
Date: Thu, 7 May 2009 10:19:24 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20090507081924.GC12285@elte.hu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20090506204700.GA24160@infradead.org>

* Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org> wrote:

> On Wed, May 06, 2009 at 01:32:24PM -0700, Roland McGrath wrote:
> > > Something like the patch below allows the reuse of the locked 
> > > version of __ptrace_may_access and pushes the int->bool conversion 
> > > into an inline.
> > 
> > I think it would be cleaner and safe/simple enough to invert the public
> > ptrace_may_access() to just return the int and invert the ! on all the
> > callers (all one in fs/proc/task_mmu.c and all four in fs/proc/base.c).
> 
> Yeah.  And at the same time we might move it out of ptrace.c and 
> give it a more descriptive name given that most users aren't 
> related to ptrace in any way.  may_inspect_task maybe? [...]

That name (due to the 'may') signals/suggests a bool property as 
well, so if it has a retval==0 convention it's either incorrectly 
named, or the return convention need to stay a bool.

> [...]  I'm good at naming things..

not in this case ;-)

	Ingo