On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 02:24:04PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Al Viro wrote: > > > > Um... Here it would happen only on attempt to return an entry for file > > that really has an inumber not fitting into the field; what would you > > do in such case? > > You'd truncate the inode number. What's the big deal? Inode numbers aren't > that important - they're just about the _least_ important part of the data > returned for a readdir. Tell that to tar(1) ;-) > But I also think that we're not in a transition period any more, and as a > result the annoyance part is just annoying an doesn't help find and fix > problems any more, it just makes legacy binaries not work even if they > could otherwise work fine (and _maybe_ have problems). > > So something that made sense five years ago may not make sense any more, > is what I'm saying. These days, if somebody runs legacy binaries, they do > it because of archeology reasons or similar.. I suspect that SUS specifies that crap in some cases, but I honestly do not remember. For large offsets, that is. Large inode numbers are more recent and hit relatively few filesystems. OTOH, I suspect that most of getdents() call sites are in libc anyway... Anyway, the point for getdents() is simply that we *do* return an error; it's just that it ends up with -EINVAL instead of -EOVERFLOW, and that's simply bogus - we should either truncate silently or return the right value. The code definitely intends to do the latter and fucks up. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
