Message-ID: <496CE234.2070900@zytor.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:49:24 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: Harvey Harrison <harvey.harrison@gmail.com>
CC: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@gmail.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>,
       Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>,
       LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Jaswinder Singh Rajput <jaswinderlinux@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH -tip] x86: headers - fix export private data to userspace
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Harvey Harrison wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 21:34 +0300, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
>> Impact: cleanup
> 
>> 4) setup.h - COMMAND_LINE_SIZE saved for userspace, bootloaders
>>    could use it.
> 
> Doesn't this need to be (at least) _COMMAND_LINE_SIZE to avoid
> polluting the namespace, not sure it can be changed though as the
> horse is already out of the barn.

No, this is not one of those cases, but it's worth explaining why.

You can introduce symbols into the general namespace if *and only if*
they are in a header file that is invoked directly by the user.  In
other words, such a header file is unusable by libc, but setup.h doesn't
contain anything needed by libc in the first place.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.

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