Hi Steve, On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 8:37 PM Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, 14 May 2019 11:02:17 +0200 > Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 10:29 AM David Laight <David.Laight@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > And I like Steven's "(fault)" idea. > > > > How about this: > > > > > > > > if ptr < PAGE_SIZE -> "(null)" > > > > if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr) -> "(fault)" > > > > > > > > -ss > > > > > > Or: > > > if (ptr < PAGE_SIZE) > > > return ptr ? "(null+)" : "(null)"; > > Hmm, that is useful. > > > > if IS_ERR_VALUE(ptr) > > > return "(errno)" > > I still prefer "(fault)" as is pretty much all I would expect from a > pointer dereference, even if it is just bad parsing of, say, a parsing > an MAC address. "fault" is generic enough. "errno" will be confusing, > because that's normally a variable not a output. > > > > > Do we care about the value? "(-E%u)"? > > That too could be confusing. What would (-E22) be considered by a user > doing an sprintf() on some string. I know that would confuse me, or I > would think that it was what the %pX displayed, and wonder why it > displayed it that way. Whereas "(fault)" is quite obvious for any %p > use case. I would immediately understand there's a missing IS_ERR() check in a function that can return -EINVAL, without having to add a new printk() to find out what kind of bogus value has been received, and without having to reboot, and trying to reproduce... Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds