“‘It’s time to sanitize prototypes of bdev ->open(),
->release() and ->ioctl(),’ Al Viro began in an RFC posted to
the Linux Kernel mailing list, ‘this stuff had sat in ‘need to fix’
for a long time and there is a bunch of bugs hard to fix without
dealing with it.’ Following a detailed explanation of how he
intends to meet this goal, he added, ‘[the] resulting APIs will be
a lot saner and [the] entire thing is reasonably easy to split into
bisect-friendly chunks. It is an API breaker, of course, but we
don’t have a lot of affected modules and anything not converted
will be (a) immediately caught by gcc and (b) trivial to
convert.’“Linux creator Linus Torvalds responded favorably to the
proposal, ‘from your description, I have no objections–everything
sounds good…”