On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 02:29:06PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
On Wed, 16 Mar 2022 19:49:38 +0530 Charan Teja Kalla quic_charante@quicinc.com wrote:
IMO, it's worth to note in man page.
Or the current patch for just ENOMEM is sufficient here and we just have to update the man page?
I think the "On success, process_madvise() returns the number of bytes advised" behaviour sounds useful. But madvise() doesn't do that.
RETURN VALUE On success, madvise() returns zero. On error, it returns -1 and errno is set to indicate the error.
So why is it desirable in the case of process_madvise()?
Since process_madvise deal with multiple ranges and could fail at one of them in the middle or pocessing, people could decide where the call failed and then make a strategy whether they will abort at the point or continue to hint next addresses. Here, problem of the strategy is API doesn't return any error vaule if it has processed any bytes so they would have limitation to decide a policy. That's the limitation for every vector IO syscalls, unfortunately.
And why was process_madvise() designed this way? Or was it always simply an error in the manpage?