Subject: Re: signal(SIGSEGV, SIG_IGN) -> 100% CPU
To: NetBSD Kernel Technical Discussion List <tech-kern@netbsd.org>
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
List: tech-kern
Date: 06/13/1999 18:16:32
> The syscall manual pages should very explicitly mention *only* those
> errno values which might actually be returned by the current
> implementation.  Either the pipe(2) system call must be re-implemented
> to actually pass the pointer in to the kernel and return EFAULT when
> necessary, *or* mention of EFAULT must be removed from the manual
> page.

I respectfully disagree.  The manual pages *should* document the union
of the following sets of error codes:
   - codes which can be returned by the current implementation.
   - codes which were returned by our implementation in the past.
   - codes which the implementors want to be able to return in the future.
   - codes which standards we care about say can be returned.

We want to encourage users of NetBSD to write portable code.  We
document the standards status of our calls; documenting error returns
and failure modes of system calls helps them to do this.

					- Bill