Re: consting operations

["Herbert Pötzl" <herbert@13thfloor.at>]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2003 at 11:19:01PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> 
> I was having an argument with Jeff Garzik about a completely unrelated
> part of the kernel.  He wants to have an setup routine that initialises
> various members of an ->*_ops vector to some default methods.  I wanted
> to retaliate with "But that will be in read-only storage, so you can't
> do that", but I realised that wasn't the case.
> 
> Which got me to wondering why our filesystem ops vectors aren't in
> read-only storage.  As a test, I did ext2 and moved 764 bytes from .data
> to .text -- not too significant, but not bad either (4 bytes disappeared
> somewhere.  let's call it a rounding error).
> 
> Of course, just converting ext2 yields all kinds of warnings from the
> compiler about discarding qualifiers.  We need to change linux/fs.h to
> make all those things const .... and that splatters out to about 20 places
> we need to let gcc know that yes, this local pointer really is const.
> 
> Worth it?  dunno.  Opinions?

why do you think that filesystem ops should be read only?

(or do you just mean for ext2/ext3/... ?)

best,
Herbert

> -- 
> "It's not Hollywood.  War is real, war is primarily not about defeat or
> victory, it is about death.  I've seen thousands and thousands of dead bodies.
> Do you think I want to have an academic debate on this subject?" -- Robert Fisk