Re: glibc at the Toolchains microconference at LPC 2019

[Christian Brauner <christian at brauner dot io>]

On June 26, 2019 10:33:37 PM GMT+02:00, Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
>On 6/26/19 12:56 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> * Zack Weinberg:
>> 
>>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 12:39 PM Dmitry V. Levin <ldv@altlinux.org>
>wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 06:01:28PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
>>>>> glibc system call wrappers are on the agenda:
>>>>>
>>>>>
><https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/blog/2019/toolchains-microconference-accepted-into-2019-linux-plumbers-conference/>
>>>>>
>>>>> Will anyone from the glibc community attend and can set the right
>>>>> expectations?
>>>>
>>>> What are the right expectations?
>>>
>>> Well, _I_ think glibc should provide wrappers for all Linux system
>>> calls, except those that cannot be used without stomping on internal
>>> glibc data structures (e.g. set_tid_address, set_robust_list, brk)
>and
>>> those that have been completely superseded by newer syscalls.  Other
>>> people have disagreed with me pretty strenuously, but they haven't
>>> done any of the work required to make forward progress on their more
>>> conservative policies.  I am tempted to post a patch early in the
>2.31
>>> cycle that adds wrappers for everything, and then threaten to apply
>it
>>> unilaterally unless I hear concrete objections within a week or so.
>> 
>> In my experience, it's been difficult to get reviewers.  So what the
>> project says it wants and what the project actually makes happen is
>> rather different.
>
>It is difficult to get reviewers for *all* patches.
>
>Therefore I don't think this is particular to syscall wrappers.
>
>I've tried hard to review many of your syscall wrappers and make good
>on the promise we gave to the kernel community that we would do so.
>
>Lastly, if you do reviews please provide your "Reviewed-by" markers
>since it will let me run metrics on how many people we have reviewing
>and who they are, and use that information to for a long-term strategy
>for getting more reviewers.
>
>> There is currently a requirement that every wrapper needs a manual
>entry
>> (and, presumably, a test case, although I have not tested the waters
>on
>> that).  membarrier is not included only because we could not agree on
>> the manual text.
>
>And rightly so. I would hope that we all agree that we need
>documentation
>and testing of interfaces in order to provide our users with the
>information
>they need to use these interfaces.

Difficult to get reviewers in the sense of kernel people who wrote the syscalls?
I'm trying as hard as I can to bridge the libc/kernel barrier
by always cc'ing e.g. Florian or Dmitry
and ask for input on what you need.
I'm happy to work as closely as I can.

Christian