Re: [discuss] Re: [PATCH] Add key management syscalls to non-i386 archs

[Jan-Benedict Glaw]

On Wed, 2004-10-20 16:04:50 -0700, David S. Miller <davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote in message <20041020160450.0914270b.davem@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> On Thu, 21 Oct 2004 00:56:25 +0200
> Andi Kleen <ak@xxxxxxx> wrote:

*VAX hacker's hat on*

> I disagree quite strongly.  One major frustration for users of
> non-x86 platforms is that functionality is often missing for some
> time that we can make trivial to keep in sync.

Full ACK.

> Simply put, if you're not watching the tree in painstaking detail
> every day, you miss all of these enhancements.

Right; and these missing enhancements will cause extra-pain when they're
used some time later from core code. That is, you missed the feature
while it was discusses/accepted and need to put it in place later on. So
you've got to do extra searching etc.

> The knowledge should come from the person putting the changes into
> the tree, therefore it gets done once and this makes it so that
> the other platform maintainers will find out about it automatically
> next time they update their tree.

Here's my proposal:

$ mkdir ./Documentation/new_enhancements_to_implement
$ cat ./Documentation/new_enhancements_to_implement/new_key_syscalls << EOF
> Dear Architecture Maintailers,
> 
> please add these four new cryptographic key functions to your syscall
> table. It's quite easy; just extend the ./include/arch-xxx/unistd.h
> for four new defines and then add them to your ./arch/xxx/kernel/entry.S
> file. For reference, here's my i386 patch doing this:
> 
> diff -Nurp
> --- path-old/to/file/one
> +++ path-new/to/file/one
>  text
> -del
> +add
>  more text
> 
> 
> Thanks, your keychain hacker:-)
> EOF
$

This way, all arch maintainers just *see* what needs to be done and
get a small introduction on how to do that. I'd *really* like to see
that! That would particularly help those that cannot do full-time
hacking on their port (like us VAX hackers:-)

MfG, JBG

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