Re: [PATCH][0/4] let's kill verify_area

From: Jesper Juhl
Date: Sat Jan 08 2005 - 20:12:00 EST


On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:

> Jesper Juhl <juhl-lkml@xxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Andrew Morton wrote:
> >
> > > Jesper Juhl <juhl-lkml@xxxxxx> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > verify_area() if just a wrapper for access_ok() (or similar function or
> > > > dummy function) for all arch's.
> > >
> > > This sounds more like "let's kill Andrew". I count 489 instances in the
> > > tree. Please don't expect this activity to take top priority ;)
> > >
> > Heh, right, there's an aspect I hadn't really considered.
> > I'm not expecting top priority, not at all. This is nowhere near being
> > anything important, just something that should happen eventually - so I
> > thought, why not just deprecate it now and let it be cleaned up over time
> > (and I'll do my share, don't worry :)
> >
> > Accept the patch if you think it makes sense, drop it if you think it does
> > not (or should wait).
>
> The way to do this is to fix up the callers first, in just ten or so
> patches. Then mark the function deprecated when most of the conversion is
> done.
>
> If we deprecate the functions first then 10000 people send small fixes via
> various snaky routes and it's really hard to coordinate the overlapping
> fixes. The s/MODULE_PARM/module_param/ stuff did that, because we made it
> warn first, then I held the big sweep patch off for 2.6.11.
>

Ok, that makes sense.

Here's my plan then:

I'll get to work on converting roughly one tenth og the verify_area
occourances and then post a patch for that for review. If it turns out to
be OK I'll get to work on the rest and do as many as I can and at that
point (assuming those patches are also OK) I'll re-submit a patch to
deprecate the function so the remaining instances can get cleaned up and
the function removed.
This will probably take me a few days to do since A) it seems I didn't
even get my initial conversions correct so I'll need to be more careful,
and B) I have limited time. But, I'll start doing the initial 1/10'th
patch now and hopefully post that to lkml within a few days.

Thank you for your feedback.


--
Jesper Juhl


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/