Re: Read/write counts

[Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>]

On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 09:56:07AM -0700, Bryan Henderson wrote:
> Programs that assume a full transfer are fairly common, but are 
> universally regarded as either broken or just lazy, and when it does cause 
> a problem, it is far more common to fix the application than the kernel.

Linus has explicitly forbidden short reads from being returned.  The
original poster may get away with it for a specialised case, but for
example, signals may not cause a return to userspace with a short read
for exactly this reason.