Hi Alex,

On Thu, Mar 2, 2023 at 10:35 AM Alexandre Ghiti [off-list ref] wrote:

This all came up in the context of increasing COMMAND_LINE_SIZE in the
RISC-V port.  In theory that's a UABI break, as COMMAND_LINE_SIZE is the
maximum length of /proc/cmdline and userspace could staticly rely on
that to be correct.

Usually I wouldn't mess around with changing this sort of thing, but
PowerPC increased it with a5980d064fe2 ("powerpc: Bump COMMAND_LINE_SIZE
to 2048").  There are also a handful of examples of COMMAND_LINE_SIZE
increasing, but they're from before the UAPI split so I'm not quite sure
what that means: e5a6a1c90948 ("powerpc: derive COMMAND_LINE_SIZE from
asm-generic"), 684d2fd48e71 ("[S390] kernel: Append scpdata to kernel
boot command line"), 22242681cff5 ("MIPS: Extend COMMAND_LINE_SIZE"),
and 2b74b85693c7 ("sh: Derive COMMAND_LINE_SIZE from
asm-generic/setup.h.").

It seems to me like COMMAND_LINE_SIZE really just shouldn't have been
part of the uapi to begin with, and userspace should be able to handle
/proc/cmdline of whatever length it turns out to be.  I don't see any
references to COMMAND_LINE_SIZE anywhere but Linux via a quick Google
search, but that's not really enough to consider it unused on my end.

This issue was already considered in s390 and they reached the same
conclusion in commit 622021cd6c56 ("s390: make command line
configurable").

The feedback on the v1 seemed to indicate that COMMAND_LINE_SIZE really
shouldn't be part of uapi, so this now touches all the ports.  I've
tried to split this all out and leave it bisectable, but I haven't
tested it all that aggressively.

Changes since v3 <https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230214074925.228106-1-alexghiti@rivosinc.com/ (local)>:
* Added RB/AB
* Added a mention to commit 622021cd6c56 ("s390: make command line
  configurable") in the cover letter

Thanks for the update!

 Apparently you forgot to add your own SoB?

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds