On Fri, Feb 10, 2023 at 2:08 PM Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > (a) the first one is to protect from endless loops Just to clarify: they're not "endless loops" per se, but we have splice sources and destinations that always succeed, like /dev/zero and /dev/null. So things like "sendfile()" that are happy to just repeat until done do need to have some kind of signal handling even for the case when we're not actually waiting for data. That's what that whole /* * Check for signal early to make process killable when there are * always buffers available */ this is all about. See commit c725bfce7968 ("vfs: Make sendfile(2) killable even better") for a less obvious example than that "zero->null" kind of thing. (I actually suspect that /dev/zero no longer works as a splice source, since we disabled the whole "fall back to regular IO" that Christoph did in 36e2c7421f02 "fs: don't allow splice read/write without explicit ops"). Linus