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authorAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>2022-08-16 11:57:56 -0400
committerAl Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>2022-08-17 17:25:04 -0400
commit25885a35a72007cf28ec5f9ba7169c5c798f7167 (patch)
tree948589bcdf9420b67123d83eab2cf7f7d8bdbcf8 /Documentation/filesystems
parentd6da19c9cace63290ccfccb1fc35151ffefc0bec (diff)
downloadlinux-25885a35a72007cf28ec5f9ba7169c5c798f7167.tar.gz
Change calling conventions for filldir_t
filldir_t instances (directory iterators callbacks) used to return 0 for
"OK, keep going" or -E... for "stop".  Note that it's *NOT* how the
error values are reported - the rules for those are callback-dependent
and ->iterate{,_shared}() instances only care about zero vs. non-zero
(look at emit_dir() and friends).

So let's just return bool ("should we keep going?") - it's less confusing
that way.  The choice between "true means keep going" and "true means
stop" is bikesheddable; we have two groups of callbacks -
	do something for everything in directory, until we run into problem
and
	find an entry in directory and do something to it.

The former tended to use 0/-E... conventions - -E<something> on failure.
The latter tended to use 0/1, 1 being "stop, we are done".
The callers treated anything non-zero as "stop", ignoring which
non-zero value did they get.

"true means stop" would be more natural for the second group; "true
means keep going" - for the first one.  I tried both variants and
the things like
	if allocation failed
		something = -ENOMEM;
		return true;
just looked unnatural and asking for trouble.

[folded suggestion from Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>]
Acked-by: Christian Brauner (Microsoft) <brauner@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/filesystems')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/filesystems/porting.rst11
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/porting.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/porting.rst
index aee9aaf9f3df..e8f370d9ce9c 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/porting.rst
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/porting.rst
@@ -922,3 +922,14 @@ is provided - file_open_root_mnt().  In-tree users adjusted.
 no_llseek is gone; don't set .llseek to that - just leave it NULL instead.
 Checks for "does that file have llseek(2), or should it fail with ESPIPE"
 should be done by looking at FMODE_LSEEK in file->f_mode.
+
+---
+
+*mandatory*
+
+filldir_t (readdir callbacks) calling conventions have changed.  Instead of
+returning 0 or -E... it returns bool now.  false means "no more" (as -E... used
+to) and true - "keep going" (as 0 in old calling conventions).  Rationale:
+callers never looked at specific -E... values anyway.  ->iterate() and
+->iterate_shared() instance require no changes at all, all filldir_t ones in
+the tree converted.