Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:44:06 +1100 | From | Nick Piggin <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH][RFC] splice support |
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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.
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