OVERFLOW not such a great idea [LWN.net]

OVERFLOW not such a great idea

Posted Sep 26, 2003 16:23 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: OVERFLOW not such a great idea by viro
Parent article: dev_t expands at last

If your code doesn't deal with that gracefully

This isn't about dealing with the failure gracefully. It's about the failure itself. If, when you stat a file and some return value won't fit, your program fails gracefully with the message, "I can't tell you what the file permissions are because the kernel won't tell me," that's not nearly as good as "here are the file permissions."

The point that when you're returning multiple pieces of information, it's better to return partial information than to fail the entire request, is a good one. And doing that for some fields even though you don't do it for others is better than doing it for none of them.

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Have you ever read "Worse is Better"?

Posted Sep 26, 2003 16:40 UTC (Fri) by im14u2c (subscriber, #5246) [Link]

Have you ever read the document The Rise of "Worse is Better"? This particular decision path sounds familiar.

The document recounts the following scenario:

Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The right thing is to back out and restore the user program PC to the instruction that invoked the system routine so that resumption of the user program after the interrupt, for example, re-enters the system routine. It is called ``PC loser-ing'' because the PC is being coerced into ``loser mode,'' where ``loser'' is the affectionate name for ``user'' at MIT.

The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing.

The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix--namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity.

The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn't understand (I'm not sure I do either).

Sound familiar? "Push the problem to user space."

In this particular case, I think -EOVERFLOW has better potential to be right than filling in certain fields with magic values, since an old app is more likely to be looking for generic error messages than recently ordained Magic Numbers. Much of this adaptation could be hidden inside libc, theoretically, since libc should be using the updated system calls anyway. Someone running binary-only with a too-old libc should expect some breakage. A minimal patch to libc could provide the desired behavior if needed as a crutch for some old binary-only application.

OVERFLOW not such a great idea

Posted Sep 27, 2003 5:19 UTC (Sat) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

Sigh... RTF{S,posting you are replying to}, please. Again, the same
stat() variants that can give you -EOVERFLOW due to st_dev and
st_rdev being too large *already* gave you -EOVERFLOW if st_size
was too large. Nothing new here - exact same spot in your program
had already been a source of -EOVERFLOW for some files.