> Hmm.. I see the whole series, and I see this patch, but I think it adds > new code and new complexity, and I don't really see *why*. The motivation is to get the arch function out of the code path for the machine-independent request handling. I want to be able to change the implementation later without touching the arch code again. The arguments passed down to arch_ptrace are sufficient for what the arch code itself needs and for the current implementation in ptrace_request. In future, I'd like the option of changing the code for the standard requests to use a local data structure set up at the start of ptrace, and such like (so more pointers and the like would need to be passed down to ptrace_request). These patches let me remove ptrace_request or change its calling convention without touching the arch code again. > Wouldn't it be nicer to just let "arch_ptrace()" return a flag saying > whether it handled things or not? It would certainly be nicer. I would prefer: extern int arch_ptrace(struct task_struct *child, long request, long addr, long data, long *retval); where it returns an error code or it returns 0 and *retval is the value or it returns 1 and it didn't do anything. The reason I took the approach I did instead is incrementalism. I can't change that signature without breaking about 22 arch builds. I'm only really prepared to thoroughly verify a change on 2 of those myself. It should be a simple enough change to make blind and get right. But I've gotten a lot of things wrong before. On principle, I wouldn't really expect anyone to sign off on stuff I won't even claim to have tried. I did the forced_successful_syscall_return() macro for arch's I don't try to build, and was just awful sure golly that I hadn't got them wrong, because the generic change would break those few arch's (not 20) without it. So this ugliness seemed like a better bet than waiting for 20 more arch sign-offs before any of it could go in. You are certainly in a position to just change the generic signature and make every arch do the update (or fix your typos if you just tweak them all blind), and let them grumble. I did not presume to do so. If you'd like a patch that changes this signature, updates all arch implementations, and is actually verified to compile and work only on x86 and powerpc, I'll be happy to provide that. Thanks, Roland -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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