Re: 2.1.118 Tons of oopes

Jakub Jelinek (jj@sunsite.ms.mff.cuni.cz)
Wed, 26 Aug 1998 20:08:17 +0200 (MET DST)

>
> 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).
>
> Perhaps you consider silent total failures acceptable.

They won't break, because nobody spoke about binary compatibility and
if you recompile a structure initialization, it will fill unmentioned
entries at the end with zeros.
What could be helpful for such things would be using the GCC extension
{
open: tty_open,
flush: NULL,
}

like we do for most of the SCSI drivers already.
With that, such a change would not cause a patch touching so many files.

Cheers,
Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
Ultralinux - first 64bit OS to take full power of the UltraSparc
Linux version 2.1.115 on a sparc64 machine (498.80 BogoMips).
___________________________________________________________________

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