Re: [PATCH] Add getdents32t syscall

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> 
> Userland struct dirent is:

Ahh. So with the new thing, you'd need no conversion at all.

> (since 1997 or so), so with the extended getdents syscall glibc would need
> to memmove every name by 1 byte.

The thing is, I hate encouraging glibc's behaviour of "we'll make up our
own structures", and then ask the kernel to fix it later when it was done
wrong in glibc. This is a totally new format that is totally unnecessary,
and the RIGHT thing to do is to have glibc just use the proper 64-bit
format.

In other words, why doesn't glibc ever just make a new major number and
make its "struct dirent" be the 64-bit version? It is _ridiculous_ to
carry this baggage around, and then complain and add MORE baggage to the
kernel because of having done things wrong the first time around.

			Linus