On Fri, Feb 03, 2012 at 01:16:12AM +0000, Al Viro wrote: > After looking a bit more: nlink_t is a f*cking mess. Almost any code > using that type kernel-side is broken. Crap galore: > * sometimes it's 32 bits, sometimes 16, sometimes 64. Essentially > at random. > * almost all have it unsigned, except for sparc32, where it's > signed short [inherited from v7 via SunOS? BTW, in v6 it used to be even > funnier - char, which is where ridiculous LINK_MAX == 127 comes from] > > IOW, nlink_t is an attractive nuisance - it's nearly impossible to use in > a portable way and we are lucky that almost nobody tries to. Incidentally, why the hell do we have typedef __kernel_nlink_t nlink_t; anyway? It's *not* exposed to userland and it's different from the userland nlink_t (which is unsigned int on 32bit and unsigned long on 64bit). Why not use __kernel_nlink_t (or explicitly-sized __uNN) in arch/*/include/asm/stat.h and declare nlink_t kernel-side as __u32? Why do we have daddr_t, while we are at it? There is exactly one user - fs/freevxfs and there we definitely want a fixed-sized type. -- 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
