Re: [PATCH][RFC] splice support

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Andrew Morton wrote:

>Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> wrote:
>
>>Right now "flags" doesn't do anything at all, and you should just pass in 
>>zero.
>>
>
>In that case perhaps we should be enforcing flags==0 so that future
>flags-using applications will reliably fail on old flags-not-understanding
>kernels.
>
>But that won't work if we later define a bit in flags to mean "behave like
>old kernels used to".  So perhaps we should require that bits 0-15 of
>`flags' be zero and not care about bits 16-31.
>
>IOW: it might be best to make `flags' just go away, and add new syscalls in
>the future as appropriate.
>

Well it is always going to transfer data from infd to outfd, isn't it?
If something comes up that does not do that, then that should be a new
syscall rather than a new flag.

flags just modify the manner of the transfer I think. Things should still
work if some flag is not supported, perhaps just not with optimal
performance. That said, unsupported flags probably should fail, shouldn't
they? The application / library could then retry with flags = 0.

--

Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com