On Jun 27 Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The correct error code for "I don't understand this ioctl" is ENOTTY.
> The naming may be odd, but you should think of that error value as a
> "unrecognized ioctl number, you're feeding me random numbers that I
> don't understand and I assume for historical reasons that you tried to
> do some tty operation on me".
[...]
> The EINVAL thing goes way back, and is a disaster. It predates Linux
> itself, as far as I can tell. You'll find lots of man-pages that have
> this line in it:
>
> EINVAL Request or argp is not valid.
>
> and it shows up in POSIX etc. And sadly, it generally shows up
> _before_ the line that says
>
> ENOTTY The specified request does not apply to the kind of object
> that the descriptor d references.
>
> so a lot of people get to the EINVAL, and never even notice the ENOTTY.
[...]
> At least glibc (and hopefully other C libraries) use a _string_ that
> makes much more sense: strerror(ENOTTY) is "Inappropriate ioctl for
> device"
So let's correct this in the <linux/firewire-cdev.h> ABI while it is
still young, relative to distributor adoption.
Side note: We return -ENOTTY not only on _IOC_TYPE or _IOC_NR mismatch,
but also on _IOC_SIZE mismatch. An ioctl with an unsupported size of
argument structure can be seen as an unsupported version of that ioctl.
Signed-off-by: Stefan Richter <stefanr@s5r6.in-berlin.de>
Cc: <stable@kernel.org>
d873d79423