Re: [Patch net] atm: remove an unnecessary loop

On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 9:10 AM, David Miller [off-list ref] wrote:

From: Francois Romieu <romieu@fr.zoreil.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2017 01:07:00 +0100

quoted

Were alloc_skb moved one level up in the call stack, there would be
no need to use the new wait api in the subsequent page, thus easing
pre 3.19 longterm kernel maintenance (at least those on korg page).

But it tastes a tad bit too masochistic.

Lack of error handling of allocation failure is always a huge red
flag.  We even long ago tried to do something like this for TCP FIN
handling.

It's dumb, it doesn't work.

Therefore I agree that the correct fix is to move the SKB allocation
up one level to vcc_sendmsg() and make it handle errors properly.

If you can justify API is not broken by doing that, I am more than happy
to do it, as I already stated in the latter patch:

"Of course, the logic itself is suspicious, other sendmsg()
could handle skb allocation failure very well, not sure
why ATM has to wait for a successful one here. But probably
it is too late to change since the errno and behavior is
visible to user-space. So just leave the logic as it is."

For some reason, no one reads that patch. :-/