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0 pointsdfox4y ago0 comments

Userspace should not expect that any given syscall can only return some set of known errno values. You should enumerate the cases where you want to do some kind of special handling (with EINTR being somewhat more important that other cases) and have path to somehow handle even unexpected errno values.

Both Linux man pages and SUS specify some set of possible error situations, but not all of them. In the man pages case the set is not at all fixed and is subject to change and often does not contain some of the more obscure error states. The SUS "Errors" section are explicitly not meant to be complete and the OS can return additional errno values, additionally the OS can even handle some of the error cases as undefined behavior and not return any error code at all (notable example: doing anything to already joined pthread_t on linux, whish is undefined and does not return -ESRCH).

0 comments

matheusmoreira4y ago

You're right. The manual contains this ominous notice at the very end of the errors section:

https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/write.2.html

> Other errors may occur, depending on the object connected to fd.

I don't understand why every possible result isn't explicitly documented. This is the Linux system call interface, we need to know everything that could happen when we make these calls.

dfoxOP4y ago

The right assumption is that every syscall can return any defined errno value. In practice this means that you should handle the cases that you have to handle (-EINTR and for write(2) incomplete writes, which are typical reason for “fatal error: Success”), that you can somehow handle (things like retries for -ENOSPC) and log strerror(3) result for anything that you don't expect (whether you shoult then abort(), exit() or continue depends on how critical the failed syscall was).

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