On Tue, 21 Apr 2015, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > On Tuesday 21 April 2015 16:14:26 Thomas Gleixner wrote: > > > Note the use of a separate __kernel_itimerspec64 for the user interface > > > here, which I think will be needed to hide the differences between the > > > normal itimerspec on 64-bit machines, and the new itimerspec on 32-bit > > > platforms that will be defined differently (using 'long long'). > > > > Confused. > > > > timespec64 / itimerspec64 should be the same independent of 64bit and > > 32bit. So why do we need another variant ? > > There are multiple reasons: > > * On 64-bit systems, timespec64 would always be defined in the same way > as struct timespec { __kernel_time_t tv_sec; long tv_nsec; }, with > __kernel_time_t being 'long'. On 32-bit, we probably need to make both > members 'long long' for the user space side, in order to share the > syscall implementation with the kernel side, but we may also want to > keep the internal timespec64 using a 'long' for tv_nsec, as we do > today. This means that both the binary layout (padding or no padding) > and the basic types (long or long long) are different between 32-bit > and 64-bit, and between kernel and user space So you want to avoid a compat syscall for 32bit applications on a 64bit kernel, right? That burdens 32bit with the extra 'long long' in user space. Not sure whether user space folks will be happy about it. > * We should not put 'struct timespec64' into the user space namespace, > as applications might already use that identifier. This is similar > to the __u32/u32 or __kernel_time_t/time_t tuple of types for interface > and in-kernel uses. This is particularly important when embedding a > timespec in another data structure. Fair enough. > * My plan is to use a temporary hack where I actually define > __kernel_timespec64 to look like the 32-bit version of timespec, > as an intermediate step when converting all 32-bit architectures over > to use the compat_*() syscalls in place of the existing ones, so > I can change over the normal syscalls to use __kernel_timespec64 > without having to change all architectures at once, or having to > modify each syscall multiple times. Makes sense. Thanks, tglx -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html