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Date:      Thu, 15 Jul 1999 23:45:29 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "Brian F. Feldman" <green@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com>
Cc:        Andrew Reilly <a.reilly@lake.com.au>, "Daniel C. Sobral" <dcs@newsguy.com>, lyndon@orthanc.ab.ca, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Swap overcommit
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.9907152343060.47920-100000@janus.syracuse.net>
In-Reply-To: <199907160300.UAA14677@apollo.backplane.com>

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On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Matthew Dillon wrote:

> 
>     The are dozens of libc routines which call malloc internally and return 
>     allocated storage.  strdup(), opendir(), fopen(), setvbuf(), asprintf(),
>     and so forth.  Dozens.  And while we might check some of these for NULL, 
>     we don't check them all, and the ones we do check we tend to conclude
>     a failure other then a memory failure.  We would assume that the directory
>     or file does not exist, for example.  How many programmers check errno 
>     after such a failure?  Very few.  How many programmers bother to even
>     *clear* errno before making these calls (since some system calls do not
					       ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
We're not supposed to have to clear errno unless we have to explicitly
test if it has changed. We're not supposed to clear it before any system
call which could possibly fail and set errno.

>     set errno if it already non-zero).  Virtually nobody.
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Erm... WTF?!?! If so, why the HELL are we doing that?!?

> 
> 					-Matt
> 					Matthew Dillon 
> 					<dillon@backplane.com>
> 
> 
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 green@FreeBSD.org                   _ __ ___ | _ ) __|   \ 
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