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Message-ID: <442B5406.9060606@yahoo.com.au>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:44:06 +1100
From: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
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To: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
CC: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>, axboe@suse.de,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH][RFC] splice support
References: <20060329122841.GC8186@suse.de>	<20060329143758.607c1ccc.akpm@osdl.org>	<Pine.LNX.4.64.0603291624420.27203@g5.osdl.org> <20060329180830.50666eff.akpm@osdl.org>
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Andrew Morton wrote:

>Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
>
>>Right now "flags" doesn't do anything at all, and you should just pass in 
>>zero.
>>
>
>In that case perhaps we should be enforcing flags==0 so that future
>flags-using applications will reliably fail on old flags-not-understanding
>kernels.
>
>But that won't work if we later define a bit in flags to mean "behave like
>old kernels used to".  So perhaps we should require that bits 0-15 of
>`flags' be zero and not care about bits 16-31.
>
>IOW: it might be best to make `flags' just go away, and add new syscalls in
>the future as appropriate.
>

Well it is always going to transfer data from infd to outfd, isn't it?
If something comes up that does not do that, then that should be a new
syscall rather than a new flag.

flags just modify the manner of the transfer I think. Things should still
work if some flag is not supported, perhaps just not with optimal
performance. That said, unsupported flags probably should fail, shouldn't
they? The application / library could then retry with flags = 0.

--

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