Commits
Al Viro committed 47e393622bb
aio_run_iocb(): kill dead check We check if ->ki_pos is positive. However, by that point we have already done rw_verify_area(), which would have rejected such unless the file had been one of /dev/mem, /dev/kmem and /proc/kcore. All of which do not have vectored rw methods, so we would've bailed out even earlier. This check had been introduced before rw_verify_area() had been added there - in fact, it was a subset of checks done on sync paths by rw_verify_area() (back then the /dev/mem exception didn't exist at all). The rest of checks (mandatory locking, etc.) hadn't been added until later. Unfortunately, by the time the call of rw_verify_area() got added, the /dev/mem exception had already appeared, so it wasn't obvious that the older explicit check downstream had become dead code. It *is* a dead code, though, since the few files for which the exception applies do not have ->aio_{read,write}() or ->{read,write}_iter() and for them we won't reach that check anyway. What's more, even if we ever introduce vectored methods for /dev/mem and friends, they'll have to cope with negative positions anyway, since readv(2) and writev(2) are using the same checks as read(2) and write(2) - i.e. rw_verify_area(). Let's bury it. Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>