Excerpts from Alexey Dobriyan's message of April 14, 2022 2:55 am: > Returning ESRCH is better so that programs don't waste time reading and > closing empty files and instantiating useless inodes. Yes, except ESRCH is not returned for open, it is returned for read. > Of course it is different if this patch was sent as response to a regression. I'm not sure I would classify it as a regression; I don't have an existing program which broke, it is a new program which happens to use some functionality which worked with a previous kernel. It is theoretically possible that some program exists that currently uses 4.14, and will break if upgraded to 4.19+, but it is also possible that some program exists that currently uses 4.19+ and will break if this patch is applied. Cheers, Alex.