Re: [PATCH] Updated sys_epoll now with man pages

Andrew Morton
2002-10-29T05:03:44Z

Hanna Linder wrote:
>
> sys_epoll-2.5.44-last.diff

Folks,

when I took a 15-minute look at this code last week I found several
bugs, some of which were grave. It's a terrible thing to say, but
a sensible person would expect that a closer inspection would turn
up more problems.

Now, adding bugs to existing code is fine and traditional - people
find them quickly and they get fixed up.

But for *new* code, problems will take months to discover. The only
practical way to get this code vetted for inclusion is a close review.

And that is a sizeable task. The core implementation file is
1,600 lines. And I wonder how many people have counted the
number of comments in there?

Well, I'll make it easy: zero. Nil. Nada.

(Well, OK, a copyright header, and something which got cut-n-pasted
from inode.c)

In my wildly unconventional opinion this alone makes epoll just a hack,
of insufficient quality for inclusion in Linux. We *have* to stop doing
this to ourselves!

epoll seems to be a good and desirable thing. To move forward I
believe we need to get this code reviewed, and documented.

I can do that if you like; it will take me several weeks to get onto
it. But until that is completed I would oppose inclusion of this
code.