Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 29 Jul 2005 11:37:55 +0100 | From | Russell King <> | Subject | Re: sys_times() return value |
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On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 03:35:31PM +1000, Andrew Morton wrote: > Russell King <rmk+lkml@arm.linux.org.uk> wrote: > > ARM folk have recently pointed out a problem with sys_times(). > > When the kernel boots, we set jiffies to -5 minutes. This causes > > sys_times() to return a negative number, which increments through > > zero. > > > > However, some negative numbers are used to return error codes. > > Hence, there's a period of time when sys_times() returns values > > which are indistinguishable from error codes shortly after boot. > > What a strange system call. > > > This probably only affects 32-bit architectures. However, one > > wonders whether sys_times() needs force_successful_syscall_return(). > > I'd say so, yes. But lots of architectures seem to have a no-op there.
As I mentioned below, these other architectures need glibc to be fixed.
> > Also, it appears that glibc does indeed interpret the return value > > from sys_times in the way I describe above on at least ARM and x86. > > Other architectures may be similarly affected. Hopefully the ARM > > glibc folk will raise a cross-architecture bug in glibc for this.
-- Russell King Linux kernel 2.6 ARM Linux - http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/ maintainer of: 2.6 Serial core - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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