Hello,

for the RTEMS pre-qualification project I review currently most parts of the Classic API. It seems we have an unwritten rule that directives should not write to variables referenced by directive parameters if an error occurs. Examples:

* rtems_task_mode(previous_mode)

* rtems_task_set_priority(previous_priority)

* rtems_message_queue_receive(message_size)

* rtems_event_receive(received_events)

We should think about changing this rule to instead return "safe" values in error conditions. For example, lets have an application bug I encountered this year. The code originally looked like this:

#define APP_TIMEOUT RTEMS_NO_TIMEOUT

rtems_event_set events;

(void) rtems_event_receive(

    RTEMS_ALL_EVENTS,
    RTEMS_EVENT_ANY | RTEMS_WAIT,
    APP_TIMEOUT,
    &events
  );

if (event & X) != 0) {

...

}

Ok, you should check the return value, but ...

Something didn't go well and someone changed APP_TIMEOUT:

#define APP_TIMEOUT 1000

Now, sometimes the rtems_event_receive() timed out and the application worked with events produced by the stack frame and not rtems_event_receive(). In the case of rtems_message_queue_receive() it would be the message size.

In order to let broken applications fail a bit more gracefully, it would help to set the events and the message size to zero if the directive returns with an error. The modes could be set to the defaults, the priority to some invalid value, etc.

What do you think?

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