From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262336AbTE2PoW (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 May 2003 11:44:22 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262341AbTE2PoV (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 May 2003 11:44:21 -0400 Received: from wmail.atlantic.net ([209.208.0.84]:64726 "HELO wmail.atlantic.net") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S262336AbTE2PoR (ORCPT ); Thu, 29 May 2003 11:44:17 -0400 Message-ID: <3ED63032.3030702@techsource.com> Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 12:07:14 -0400 From: Timothy Miller User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ed L Cashin CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jim Houston Subject: Re: signal queue resource - Posix timers References: <200305281856.h4SIuFZ02449@linux.local> <20030529014608.GX8978@holomorphy.com> <87y90q1fxm.fsf@cs.uga.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Ed L Cashin wrote: > William Lee Irwin III writes: > > >> >>Well, I've never run into it and it sounds really obscure, but I agree >>in principle that it's better to return an explicit error to userspace >>than to silently fail, at least when it's feasible (obviously the kernel >>can be beaten to death with events faster than it can deliver them, so >>it won't always be feasible). > > > Why couldn't this be a configurable per-user thing like RSS rlimits? > Pardon me for butting in... It seems to me that returning an error on unrecoverable failure is ALWAYS the right thing to do. We're not doing that right now, and that's okay. We can simply admit that we're not quite doing the right thing and get around to fixing it later. But once the fix has been made, why would anyone want it to be optional? Is it so rare an event that the performance hit isn't worth the catastrophe which might occur if we don't properly return an error?