Re: [PATCH][RFC] splice support

[Nick Piggin]

Andrew Morton wrote:

> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxx> 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.

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