Bosko Milekic wrote: > On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 11:32:03PM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote: > > Can we get rid of the NULL tests we had to put in when M_WAIT > > turned into M_WAITOK? > > No. What you see as a bad thing others (including me) see as a good > thing. I _want_ to be able to say: "okay, try sleeping; but I realize > that sleeping for longer than some reasonable time if I'm not getting > anything to begin with will probably not get me anything at any point > so tell me the allocation really failed and give me the opportunity to > clean up before *I* decide what I want to do."
Up the operating system's wazoo! *We* are the programmers. *We* know better than *it* whether it's OK to sleep indefinitely or not. If *we* want the allocation to fail after *some reasonable time*, then *we will damn well set a timer to "some reasonable time"* to indicate that fact to the OS. If *we* do *not* damn well set a timer, then *we* damn well do not want it to fail, *we* want it to hang either *until it succeeds* or *until hell freezes over* or *until we manually enter the kernel debugger to find out why it is hanging*. All these people are bitching about kludging around something by changing M_WAITOK to M_NOWAIT. The kludge is *already there* in M_WAITOK, whether you want it or not. So bitching about this kluge is meaningless: changing it back to M_WAITOK won't make the little F'er go away, it will just *hide* the kludge from people to lazy to read the code all the way down, and know *why* they have to check for a NULL return from a call that's *supposed to wait* until it's return will *not* be NULL. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
