Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755465AbZGBCWu (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Jul 2009 22:22:50 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754082AbZGBCWm (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Jul 2009 22:22:42 -0400 Received: from mail-vw0-f202.google.com ([209.85.212.202]:62198 "EHLO mail-vw0-f202.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753033AbZGBCWm convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Wed, 1 Jul 2009 22:22:42 -0400 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:sender:in-reply-to:references:date :x-google-sender-auth:message-id:subject:from:to:cc:content-type :content-transfer-encoding; b=bPteEECUGLqmrZSEFXVnZbAugoere+J6ISf+MDskaw8mshTkuppE3p+dauMro2Y5lp q736zaYMPtTiGdOR/Mpt14NqHy+JQtCBTdL3d2Mm9EtPArH7aqlCl+74Kcn9Jj0flc5X 7tZp3exCN+2VLLFb/FoxJi/PrDFw0zAkP22OY= MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20090629150123.43f79091.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <20090619072212.6519.10915.sendpatchset@localhost.localdomain> <20090629150123.43f79091.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2009 22:22:45 -0400 X-Google-Sender-Auth: 4d19c111c1be8c28 Message-ID: <75b66ecd0907011922x1843c0d3g9c3bf6f686f981e2@mail.gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Patch] sysctl: forbid too long numbers From: Lee Revell To: Andrew Morton Cc: Amerigo Wang , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1108 Lines: 22 On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 6:01 PM, Andrew Morton wrote: > Or are they? ?One could imagine a script which was tested and developed > on a 64-bit system, which writes a >4G number into a pseudo file. ?That > script happens to work on 32-bit systems (it might not work _well_, but > it'll work). ?With this change, the write will fail on the 32-bit > system and the entire application could bale out or something. > > I'm not saying that this is a reason to avoid making the change, but > it's all a worry and needs consideration. This would break at least one existing setup that I know of. Consider an environment where shmmax is set to the value the biggest server needs (well over 4GB) on all database servers to simplify management. This change would cause the database to fail on the old 32 bit servers used for testing and QA. Lee -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/