Re: about ENOSYS

From: Greg Kroah-Hartman
Date: Mon Aug 03 2015 - 12:22:04 EST


On Mon, Aug 03, 2015 at 06:41:22AM +0000, Drokin, Oleg wrote:
> subject have been missing, so I filled in something.
>
> On Aug 3, 2015, at 2:18 AM, Shraddha Barke wrote:
>
> > From b67c6c20455b04b77447ab4561e44f1a75dd978d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> > From: Shraddha Barke <shraddha.6596@xxxxxxxxx>
> > Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 11:34:19 +0530
> > Subject: [PATCH] Staging : lustre : Use -EINVAL instead of -ENOSYS
> >
> > ENOSYS means that a nonexistent system call was called. This should
> > not be used for invalid operations on otherwise valid syscalls.
> >
> > Use -EINVAL instead of -ENOSYS. This fixes checkpatch warning message:
> >
> > WARNING: ENOSYS means 'invalid syscall nr' and nothing else
>
> Is this really true, though?
> I know you are working off what the tool reports.
> But in reality people have been using ENOSYS to indicate
> "this thing that you want is not really available"
> Reading the define file we can see:
> /usr/include/asm-generic/errno.h:#define ENOSYS 38 /* Function not implemented */
>
> $ grep -r 'ENOSYS;' fs/ | wc -l
> 75
>
> So it's extensively used in the fs tree by existing code.
>
> Hmmâ. Searching some more I arrived at commit e15f431f
> that changes the in-kernel comment and claims the "system call only stuff".
>
> So Greg, do you want Lustre to get rid of use of ENOSYS (all 16 users we have),
> or is it ok to leave them in?

For now I'd just leave it as-is.
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