Re: Recommended change

Andreas Dilger (adilger@turbolabs.com)
Fri, 17 Aug 2001 04:42:56 -0600


On Aug 17, 2001 05:57 -0400, Mike Black wrote:
> I upgraded to e2fsprog-1.23 and LInux 2.4.8 yesterday and saw this:
>
> Aug 16 08:58:20 yeti kernel: md: fsck.ext3(pid 207) used obsolete MD ioctl,
> upgrade your software to use new ictls.
>
> Do you suppose we could change the printk line to actually output the ioctl
> that was requested?
>
> i.e.:
>
> /usr/src/linux/drivers/md/md.c
>
> default:
> printk(KERN_WARNING "md: %s(pid %d) used obsolete MD
> ioctl(%d), upgrade your software to use new ictls.\n", current->comm,
> current->pid, cmd);

Some notes:
1) It should probably print the ioctl as 0x%X, because this makes it a lot
easier to decode which ioctl it is.

2) The ioctl in question is actually BLKGETSIZE64, which is part of Jens'
64-bit block device patch, but is not part of the stock kernel. It
was added to e2fsprogs in order to support devices > 2TB.

3) Drivers probably shouldn't complain about ioctls they don't understand,
as it just causes a lot of grief (see this thread here). If anything,
they _could_ complain about specific obsolete ioctl numbers, or maybe
ioctl numbers in their "allocated" namespace (0x09 for MD it appears).
Even so, this "breaks" forward compatibility, if tools try to use a
new ioctl on an older kernel before falling back to the old ioctl, you
get a lot of spurious warnings.

Cheers, Andreas

-- 
Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
                 \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert

- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/