Date: Sat, 16 Dec 2000 14:16:31 -0500 (EST) From: Bosko Milekic <bmilekic@technokratis.com> To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Subject: Changing the names of some M_flags Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0012161404350.33915-100000@jehovah.technokratis.com>
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Hello, Recently, there was a bikeshed on one of the lists dealing with whether or not to rename M_WAIT and M_DONTWAIT flags to something else that would "communicate more of the Right Thing" to developers considering that for mbuf allocations, M_WAIT may return a NULL pointer in the case where all mbuf resources are depleted and mbuf_wait time has already been spent waiting. The proposed flag names were/are: M_WAIT --> M_TRY_WAIT M_DONTWAIT --> M_DONTBLOCK I have a diff sitting here: http://people.freebsd.org/~bmilekic/m_flag_rnm.diff It's roughly 160K. On one side, personally, I wasn't so pro-the change, as I see it more as a bloat to the repo than anything else. But, I have to admit that some folks have expressed a significant interest in having them changed and with reason, so I agreed to do it. On this same side, it wasn't such a bad thing to do after all as it led me to spot some not so obfuscated and obfuscated (and potentially serious in the future) bugs which I have yet to fix. A good example is people mixing up M_WAIT and M_WAITOK in calls to malloc() which could potentially lead to disaster if we were to alter the values of the flags. On the other side, I personally do not passionately feel the change "needs" to be made. But, as mentionned, if the majority of developers think that it will avoid needless miscommunication, then I have no problem committing it. I don't want to start a bigger bikeshed from this post than it already is. I'd just like to know if anyone has any reasonable objections to having this change happen. Regards, Bosko Milekic bmilekic@technokratis.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-net" in the body of the message
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