On Dec 2, 2009, at 2:42 PM, Roger A. Faulkner wrote: > I am sponsoring this fast-track case for myself. > > No external/ABI interfaces are changing, so there is no > documentation change. > > The release binding is "minor", > so it can be done in solaris_nevada (Solaris Next, OpenSolaris) > (this will never be back-ported). > > DISCUSSION: ...
Roger, I certainly agree some of this is implementation and doesn't matter. And from a technical perspective, because the current DTrace syscall provider advertises the sysent table names and not the sub-coded man page (2) view of system calls (something we intend to rectify someday), we marked those names as Private in our stability mechanism. But from a practical perspective, I'm very uncomfortable with the *at part of this project, whereby extremely well-known fundamental names used extensively by users of DTrace based on long-standing fundamentals like syscall::open:entry just go away, essentially for no benefit. (That is, we don't actually have any pressing need to add 74 new system calls to the OS, to make use of this vast slot reclaiming) It just spuriously breaks people's DTrace scripts for no reason, and makes them harder to rewrite, since the *at variants have more complicated flags and whatnot. It would seem that for those, you can simply put the equivalent wrapper you described in the kernel, rather than libc, thereby achieving the same effect of just making the bugs and code exist in one canonical function. Is there any other benefit only achieved by removing those from the sysent table? If not, my preference would be to leave 'open' and friends alone for now, resolving that with kernel function calls instead. If we reach the point of needing the additional slot entries freed up by those, that work can be done along with a true man(2)- equivalent syscall provider. -Mike --- Mike Shapiro, Sun Microsystems Open Storage / Fishworks. blogs.sun.com/mws/
