From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262176AbVAIBJy (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Jan 2005 20:09:54 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262177AbVAIBJy (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Jan 2005 20:09:54 -0500 Received: from mail.dif.dk ([193.138.115.101]:43244 "EHLO mail.dif.dk") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262176AbVAIBJb (ORCPT ); Sat, 8 Jan 2005 20:09:31 -0500 Date: Sun, 9 Jan 2005 02:20:58 +0100 (CET) From: Jesper Juhl To: Andrew Morton Cc: Jesper Juhl , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH][0/4] let's kill verify_area In-Reply-To: <20050106175607.6b15b8e3.akpm@osdl.org> Message-ID: References: <20050106172624.7cc2a142.akpm@osdl.org> <20050106175607.6b15b8e3.akpm@osdl.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Andrew Morton wrote: > Jesper Juhl wrote: > > > > On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > > > Jesper Juhl wrote: > > > > > > > > verify_area() if just a wrapper for access_ok() (or similar function or > > > > dummy function) for all arch's. > > > > > > This sounds more like "let's kill Andrew". I count 489 instances in the > > > tree. Please don't expect this activity to take top priority ;) > > > > > Heh, right, there's an aspect I hadn't really considered. > > I'm not expecting top priority, not at all. This is nowhere near being > > anything important, just something that should happen eventually - so I > > thought, why not just deprecate it now and let it be cleaned up over time > > (and I'll do my share, don't worry :) > > > > Accept the patch if you think it makes sense, drop it if you think it does > > not (or should wait). > > The way to do this is to fix up the callers first, in just ten or so > patches. Then mark the function deprecated when most of the conversion is > done. > > If we deprecate the functions first then 10000 people send small fixes via > various snaky routes and it's really hard to coordinate the overlapping > fixes. The s/MODULE_PARM/module_param/ stuff did that, because we made it > warn first, then I held the big sweep patch off for 2.6.11. > Ok, that makes sense. Here's my plan then: I'll get to work on converting roughly one tenth og the verify_area occourances and then post a patch for that for review. If it turns out to be OK I'll get to work on the rest and do as many as I can and at that point (assuming those patches are also OK) I'll re-submit a patch to deprecate the function so the remaining instances can get cleaned up and the function removed. This will probably take me a few days to do since A) it seems I didn't even get my initial conversions correct so I'll need to be more careful, and B) I have limited time. But, I'll start doing the initial 1/10'th patch now and hopefully post that to lkml within a few days. Thank you for your feedback. -- Jesper Juhl