Re: [PATCH 0/9] Refactoring exit

Al Viro
2021-06-27T22:14:09Z

On Thu, Jun 24, 2021 at 10:45:23PM +0000, Al Viro wrote:

> 13) there's bdflush(1, whatever), which is equivalent to exit(0).
> IMO it's long past the time to simply remove the sucker.

Incidentally, calling that from ptraced process on alpha leads to
the same headache for tracer. _If_ we leave it around, this is
another candidate for "hit yourself with that special signal" -
both alpha and m68k have that syscall, and IMO adding an asm
wrapper for that one is over the top.

Said that, we really ought to bury that thing:

commit 2f268ee88abb33968501a44368db55c63adaad40
Author: Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com>
Date: Sat Dec 14 03:16:29 2002 -0800

[PATCH] deprecate use of bdflush()

Patch from Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>

We can never get rid of it if we do not deprecate it - so do so and
print a stern warning to those who still run bdflush daemons.

Deprecated for 18.5 years by now - I seriously suspect that we have
some contributors younger than that...