Re: [patch] removing EINVAL error from cacheflush() man page

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

On 05/07/2009 01:08 PM, Ralf Baechle wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 03:10:19PM +0530, Maxin John wrote:
> 
> The man page indeed deserved some polishing 15 years after I wrote it.
> Guess I have to thank Maxin for kicking me to finally do that :-)
> 
> Unlike to his patch I've chosen to document the actual behaviour in the
> BUGS section and elaborated on the history of the call on MIPS and
> differences on other architectures.  In this context I found it preferable
> to not delete the section about error returns for invalid cache args.

Edited this patch, and applied.

Cheers,

Michael


> --- cacheflush.2.orig	2009-05-07 11:12:34.000000000 +0100
> +++ cacheflush.2	2009-05-07 11:49:34.000000000 +0100
> @@ -1,5 +1,6 @@
> -.\" Written by Ralf Baechle (ralf-NfzSNkFSoiNlEiWPh9xO2Q@public.gmane.org),
> +.\" Written by Ralf Baechle (ralf-6z/3iImG2C8G8FEW9MqTrA@public.gmane.org),
>  .\" Copyright (c) 1994, 1995 Waldorf GMBH
> +.\" Copyright (c) 2009 Wind River Systems
>  .\"
>  .\" This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or
>  .\" modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
> @@ -21,7 +22,7 @@
>  .\" Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111,
>  .\" USA.
>  .\"
> -.TH CACHEFLUSH 2 2007-05-26 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
> +.TH CACHEFLUSH 2 2009-05-07 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
>  .SH NAME
>  cacheflush \- flush contents of instruction and/or data cache
>  .SH SYNOPSIS
> @@ -73,18 +74,35 @@
>  .BR BCACHE .
>  .SH CONFORMING TO
>  This Linux-specific system call is only available on MIPS based systems.
> -.\" FIXME This system call was only on MIPS back in 1.2 days, but
> -.\" by now it is on a number of other architectures (but not i386).
> -.\" Investigate the details and update this page.
> -It should not be used in programs intended to be portable.
> +Historically the system calls was available on all MIPS UNIX variants
> +including RISC/os, IRIX, Ultrix, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD as well as
> +some non-UNIX MIPS operating systems have implemented
> +.BR cacheflush ()
> +that the existence of this call in MIPS operating systems is a de-facto
> +standard.
> +.SH CAVEAT
> +.BR cacheflush ()
> +should not be used in programs intended to be portable.
> +Linux on several other architectures does support a
> +.BR cacheflush ()
> +systems call but with different arguments.
>  .\" Irix 6.5 appears to have a cacheflush() syscall -- mtk
>  .SH BUGS
> -The current implementation ignores the
> +Kernels older than 2.6.11 ignores the
>  .I addr
>  and
>  .I nbytes
>  arguments.
> -Therefore, the whole cache is always flushed.
> +Therefore, the whole cache is always flushed making this function fairly
> +expensive.
> +
> +This function is always behaving as if
> +.BR BCACHE
> +has been passed for the
> +.I cache
> +argument and does not do any error checking on the
> +.I cache
> +argument.
>  .SH COLOPHON
>  This page is part of release 3.09 of the Linux
>  .I man-pages
> 


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
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