From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Michael Kerrisk Subject: Re: [RFC][v8][PATCH 9/10]: Define clone3() syscall Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:14:16 +0200 Message-ID: References: <20091013044925.GA28181@us.ibm.com> <20091016180631.GA31036@us.ibm.com> <20091019174405.GE27627@count0.beaverton.ibm.com> <4ADCDAA8.5080408@zytor.com> <20091019235012.GF27627@count0.beaverton.ibm.com> <4ADF06B7.50508@zytor.com> <4AE0444B.5070603@zytor.com> Reply-To: mtk.manpages@gmail.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <4AE0444B.5070603@zytor.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: "H. Peter Anvin" Cc: Matt Helsley , Sukadev Bhattiprolu , randy.dunlap@oracle.com, arnd@arndb.de, Containers , Nathan Lynch , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Louis.Rilling@kerlabs.com, "Eric W. Biederman" , kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com, mingo@elte.hu, linux-api@vger.kernel.org, torvalds@linux-foundation.org, Alexey Dobriyan , roland@redhat.com, Pavel Emelyanov List-Id: linux-api@vger.kernel.org Peter, On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 1:38 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > On 10/22/2009 07:26 PM, Michael Kerrisk wrote: >>> >>> "3" is number of arguments. >> >> sys_clone3(struct clone_struct __user *ucs, pid_t __user *pids) >> >> It appears to me that the number of arguments is 2. >> > > It was 3 at one point... I'm not sure when that changed last :-/ > >>> It's better than "extended" or something like >>> that simply because "extended" just means "more than", and a number at >>> least >>> tells you *how much more than*. >> >> I'm not sure why you think including a number in the name tells us >> "how much more than". Unless you are considering the numbering to be >> version numbers, which apparently is not what you mean. > > It is a version number of sorts. So, sometimes, a number in a system call should be the bit width of some arguments(s), sometimes it should be the number of arguments, and sometimes (well, just occasionally, as in mmap2() and clone()) -- it should be a version number? Does the weather play any part in the decision? ;-) Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Author of "The Linux Programming Interface" http://blog.man7.org/