Re: [PATCH] fixing sendfile on 64bit architectures

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 12:26:43PM -0700, David Mosberger wrote:
> Andrew,
> 
> Below is a patch that tries to sanitize the dropping of unneeded
> system-call stubs in generic code.  In some instances, it would be
> possible to move the optional system-call stubs into a library routine
> which would avoid the need for #ifdefs, but in many cases, doing so
> would require making several functions global (and possibly exporting
> additional data-structures in header-files).  Furthermore, it would
> inhibit (automatic) inlining in the cases in the cases where the stubs
> are needed.  For these reasons, the patch keeps the #ifdef-approach.
> 
> This has been tested on ia64 and there were no objections from the
> arch-maintainers (and one positive response).  The patch should be
> safe but arch-maintainers may want to take a second look to see if
> additional __ARCH_OMIT_foo macros should be turned on for their
> architecture (I'm quite sure that's the case, but I wanted to play it
> safe and only preserved the status-quo in that regard).

IMHO this is exactly the wrong way around.  It should be __ARCH_WANT_*
or something like that so new architectures don't carry the old garbage
around by default.  There's far too many new architectures keeping old
syscalls by accident.