I am working on what has turned out to be a long and convoluted issue with the sendfile and sendfilev library/system calls.
The upshot of the issue is that I need sendfile to return under certain conditions that do not constitute an error. The problem I have is how to go about modifying the kernel routines called so that they terminate the processing without returning an error to the application. Now from a technical standpoint, this is pretty easy. Since an error return is propagated up the stack and terminates the processing, all I have to do is when the conditions are detected, return an error, and at the highest level on the stack check for the error and eliminate it. We already do this with the EINTR error return. The problem I have is two fold. First, returning an error where there isn't one doesn't seem valid to me. Something just bothers me about recording an error when one doesn't exist. Which leads into the second problem, which error should I choose. If I set an error return code, I have to be very careful about which one I use. It has to be something that could not normally occur, because then I would mask the problem at the top level. But if I choose something obscure, then this just make my first problem worse, because every error has some semantics associated with it, and those semantics would not apply here. So, first, how horrible is it to use an error code return as a signal between kernel routine layers? And second, assuming the first isn't judged horrible, which error would be a good choice? -- blu The #1 red flag for privacy advocates is when a law enforcement official says "If you aren't doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Utterback - Solaris RPE, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Ph:877-259-7345, Em:brian.utterback-at-ess-you-enn-dot-kom _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list opensolaris-code@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
