Subject: Re: wrap up of pipe(2)
To: Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au>
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 10/03/2001 14:55:48
I like some parts of this clarification -- certainly, it's appropriate
to document *somewhere* that pipe() is implemented as a zero-argument,
2-return-value syscall, but putting this in BUGS is not correct --
it's not a "bug", it's an implementation artifact.
When I get a chance (and if someone doesn't beat me to it), I'd be
inclined to make a pass through the section 2 manual pages to improve
errno clarity..
- changing the errno-list verbiage to say "if you get this error,
this is what it may mean" instead of the (misleading) "foo(2) fails
if..." text.
- copying the EFAULT weasel words from intro(2) into most man pages.
- document in intro(2) and elsewhere that, on some architectures, any
syscall which takes arguments can conceivably return EFAULT if the
copyin() of the arguments fails. (In practice, you'll need a
"special" syscall stub to trigger this).
- Bill