Re: [PATCH 1/3] mm/sparse: Clean up the obsolete code comment

Oscar Salvador
2019-03-20T12:20:19Z

On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 04:19:59AM -0700, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 03:35:38PM +0800, Baoquan He wrote:
> > /*
> > - * returns the number of sections whose mem_maps were properly
> > - * set. If this is <=0, then that means that the passed-in
> > - * map was not consumed and must be freed.
> > + * sparse_add_one_section - add a memory section
> > + * @nid: The node to add section on
> > + * @start_pfn: start pfn of the memory range
> > + * @altmap: device page map
> > + *
> > + * Return 0 on success and an appropriate error code otherwise.
> > */
>
> I think it's worth documenting what those error codes are. Seems to be
> just -ENOMEM and -EEXIST, but it'd be nice for users to know what they
> can expect under which circumstances.
>
> Also, -EEXIST is a bad errno to return here:
>
> $ errno EEXIST
> EEXIST 17 File exists
>
> What file? I think we should be using -EBUSY instead in case this errno
> makes it back to userspace:
>
> $ errno EBUSY
> EBUSY 16 Device or resource busy

We return -EEXIST in case the section we are trying to add is already
there, and that error is being caught by __add_pages(), which ignores the
error in case is -EXIST and keeps going with further sections.

Sure we can change that for -EBUSY, but I think -EEXIST makes more sense,
plus that kind of error is never handed back to userspace.

--
Oscar Salvador
SUSE L3