Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 11 Mar 2002 14:02:44 -0800 | Subject | Re: [PATCH 2.5.6] New wireless driver API part 2 | From | Jean Tourrilhes <> |
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On Mon, Mar 11, 2002 at 04:50:11PM -0500, Jeff Garzik wrote: > Jean Tourrilhes wrote: > > Overall looks good. My only minor objection would be that this function > should return an error value. Clearly the kmalloc can fail, at least. > > Jeff
Thanks for the quick review (as usual), very much appreciated.
Now, for the return value... I've debated this precise point. Here is the comment that I wrote in the code you just quoted : /* Note : we don't return an error to the driver, because * the driver would not know what to do about it. It can't * return an error to the user, because the event is not * initiated by a user request. * The best the driver could do is to log an error message. * We will do it ourselves instead... */ The failure to deliver an event to the user is not critical, and I don't really see what the driver code would do with a return code. In fact, event delivery to user space is not reliable (netlink may drop it in case its queues are full - this is more likely than kmalloc failure), and my code only check a few of those failure conditions, so the driver has no way to know if the message reached its intended destination. In fact, I eliminated the return code *on purpose*, to prevent driver writer to do stupid things (like shutting down the driver) or adding additional log message (waste at this point). Convincing enough ?
Have fun...
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