On Mon, Nov 04, 2024 at 01:10:56PM -0700, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > Nir Lichtman <nir@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > > > > Agreed, it feels pretty much like abandoned book keeping that gives minimal > > value since the chance of magics colliding is slim, but I think the general tip > > before the table of magics is pretty good. > > > > What is your opinion about integrating the tip in a different page and deleting > > this page entirely? > > Well, that's part of my reasoning, actually. I assume you're talking > about this: > > > It is a **very** good idea to protect kernel data structures with magic > > numbers. This allows you to check at run time whether (a) a structure > > has been clobbered, or (b) you've passed the wrong structure to a > > routine. > > The thing is, that's really not a guideline that anybody has followed > for many years. I dug into this a while back: > > https://lwn.net/Articles/915163/ Nice, interesting article and history > > There was a series to remove all of this cruft a couple of years ago > that the author eventually gave up on: > > https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1668128257.git.nabijaczleweli@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > Honestly, I think the best thing to do is to simply remove the file. Agreed, looks like he got some pushback from removing the magics from the source itself, but I don't think that should stop from removing this doc Thanks, Nir
