Re: [RFC] readdir mess

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 01:05:43PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, OGAWA Hirofumi wrote:
> > 
> > However, there are some similar stuff: ->st_size, ->st_nlink and
> > ->st_ino in stat() (cp_old_stat()). Maybe EOVERFLOW is the reason for
> > consistency...
> 
> .. I actually had an old binary that triggered that case (actually, it was 
> O_LARGEFILE in open()), and didn't work as a result. I only needed to run 
> it once, so I literally hacked up a once-time-use kernel that just removed 
> the EOVERFLOW in open.
> 
> So no, I'm not a fan of EOVERFLOW at all. Not in readdir(), not really 
> anywhere else. 

Um...  Here it would happen only on attempt to return an entry for file
that really has an inumber not fitting into the field; what would you
do in such case?  open() on a huge file is a different story, since you
would get a valid opened file and that'd be it; the logics in case of
open() is, IIRC, "I guess your binary is old, so it'll probably do other
things that would really have to trigger -EOVERFLOW; better bail out right
now".  In this case, though, you either generate an error or get wrong
values silently stored in userland struct (wrapped around inumber).