Re: [ANNOUNCE] linux-libc-headers 2.6.8.1

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Mon Aug 30, 2004 at 12:24:22AM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
>> It has never been a constant, and any portable piece of
>> software needs to evaluate it not at compile time.
>> When I first did the sparc64 port, the biggest source of
>> portability problems was of the "uses PAGE_SIZE in some way"
>> nature.
>> This is a positive change, we should break the build of these
>> apps and thus get them fixed.

On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 01:48:35AM -0600, Erik Andersen wrote:
> There is no question that using PAGE_SIZE should be considered
> harmful.  But this particular change to the linux-libc-headers
> makes it easy for the common case (bog standard x86) folk to keep
> using a fixed PAGE_SIZE value, and keep writing crap code which
> is now _guaranteed_ to blow chunks on mips, x86_64, etc.
> I think outright removal of PAGE_SIZE from user space may be a
> much better choice, with some sortof #error perhaps...  Wouldn't
> it be better for the whole world if people would get errors like
>     foo.c:10:2: #error "Don't use PAGE_SIZE, use sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE)"
> making people actually fix their code?

In general people #define PAGE_SIZE (getpagesize()) or some such.


-- wli