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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/