Now that 2.6.11 is out the door it's time to try and submit this again.
The following patches convert all users of verify_area to access_ok and
the final patch then deprecates verify_area acros all archs with the
intention of removing it completely later. These patches get rid of 99+%
of all users, there's still one or two macros left using it and there are
still a few comments left refering to it that could be cleaned up - I'll
get to those, but what remains after these patches is extremely little.
The reason for doing this is that verify_area is just a wrapper for
access_ok anyway, so there's no good reason to keep it around - access_ok
also seems more readable anyway with saner return values.
Since these patches touch things all over the tree the CC list would be
enormous if I CC'd everyone involved on all patches, so I'll just CC this
initial mail to a few key people I think are relevant (I hope I got that
list right), and the actual patches I'll just send to linux-kernel and
Andrew (or directly to people who ask for that).
I've split this into 10 patches like this :
[1] drivers part 1
This patch cleans up the first half of drivers/
[2] drivers part 2
This patch cleans up the second half of drivers/
[3] sound
Cleans up everything in sound/
[4] i386 and misc.
This cleans up arch/i386 plus kernel/ and a few other bits that
got left over from the other patches
[5] mips
Everything in arch/mips
[6] ppc, ppc64, m68k, m68knommu
ppc, ppc64, m68k and m68knommu cleanup are in this on
[7] sparc and sparc64
Thi patch takes care of sparc and sparc64
[8] x86_64 and ia64
cleanups for x86_64 and ia64 are in this patch
[9] misc remaining archs
all remaining archs are cleaned up in one bunch by this patch
[10] deprecate
This final patch deprecates verify_area across all archs.
I've been hoping that these could perhaps (after proper review of course)
go into -mm to actually get some testing beyond what I'm able to do, so
that maybe they could migrate into mainline within a release or two...
Speaking of testing, the changes in [4] are what affect my box here, so
those I've been able to both build and boot. As for the rest, I've only
been able to verify that a make of allyesconfig doesn't seem to have
issues with these patches, but I don't have any way to actually boot test
on anything but i386. But I think these patches are fairly low risk since
the change from verify_area to access_ok is resonably simple in most
cases.
I hope you will find the patches acceptable and I look forward to any
feedback you might have.
--
Jesper Juhl
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