Re: [ANNOUNCE] linux-libc-headers 2.6.8.1

[Erik Andersen <andersen@codepoet.org>]

On Mon Aug 30, 2004 at 01:07:57AM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Mon Aug 30, 2004 at 12:24:22AM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> >> It has never been a constant, and any portable piece of
> >> software needs to evaluate it not at compile time.
> >> When I first did the sparc64 port, the biggest source of
> >> portability problems was of the "uses PAGE_SIZE in some way"
> >> nature.
> >> This is a positive change, we should break the build of these
> >> apps and thus get them fixed.
> 
> On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 01:48:35AM -0600, Erik Andersen wrote:
> > There is no question that using PAGE_SIZE should be considered
> > harmful.  But this particular change to the linux-libc-headers
> > makes it easy for the common case (bog standard x86) folk to keep
> > using a fixed PAGE_SIZE value, and keep writing crap code which
> > is now _guaranteed_ to blow chunks on mips, x86_64, etc.
> > I think outright removal of PAGE_SIZE from user space may be a
> > much better choice, with some sortof #error perhaps...  Wouldn't
> > it be better for the whole world if people would get errors like
> >     foo.c:10:2: #error "Don't use PAGE_SIZE, use sysconf(_SC_PAGESIZE)"
> > making people actually fix their code?
> 
> In general people #define PAGE_SIZE (getpagesize()) or some such.

Then perhaps the right thing is for linux-libc-headers to always
provide such a define for PAGE_SIZE for _all_ architectures, not
just for those that happen to have variable PAGE_SIZE values.

 -Erik

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Erik B. Andersen             http://codepoet-consulting.com/
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