Umm. Why?
Adding an INF field will make it essentially impossible to use that thing
as a compatibility function, and/or together with the legacy rlimit()
system call. And that is going to be 99.999% of all uses.
I don't think you understand how system calls work. People don't use
Linux-only features. It's been shown over and over and over again. People
use the standard interfaces, and they don't _have_ that INF field. We can
extend ranges by just updating structures (see "stat()" and friends) and a
recompile will make it use higher limits, but we can't make programs use
new features.
So there is _no_ upside. There would be _no_ programs ever using it.
Whether the internal limits for the kernel are 32-bit or not makes
absolutely zero difference. And my argument is that _if_ they are 64-bit,
that makes the INF field even _less_ interesting. So they go from "zero
practical difference" in 32-bit to "f*ck it, nobody can _possibly_ care
even in theory" in 64-bit.
If the internal limits are 32-bit, then you just turn any 64-bit value
larger than the (32-bit) RLIM_INFINITY into a RLIM_INFINITY. And that's as
good as you can get with mixing with the legacy interface anyway.
Linus
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