Re: [PATCH RFC v3 1/6] exterr: Introduce extended syscall error reporting

From: Johannes Berg
Date: Tue Sep 15 2015 - 13:02:34 EST



> I think that anything other than the errno "grab it now or lose it"
> behavior will prove confusing. I don't think there is any other way to
> know that a given error report corresponds to a specific system call.
> Library calls can mess it up. Kernel changes adding extended reporting to
> new system calls can mess it up. Applications cannot possibly be expected
> to know which system calls might change the error-reporting status, they
> *have* to assume all of them will.
>

Yeah I was about to say something similar - an application that expects
a certain syscall to have extended errors will get confused if running
on an older kernel where that syscall in fact does *not* have extended
errors (and thus also doesn't clear extended errors) and therefore the
extended error from a previous syscall could still be lingering on (for
example because the application didn't care to fetch it for that previo
us syscall.)

johannes
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