From: Jesper Juhl The patch removes a redundant variable `sig' from sys_prctl(). For some reason, when sys_prctl is called with option == PR_SET_PDEATHSIG then the value of arg2 is assigned to an int variable named sig. Then sig is tested with valid_signal() and later used to set the value of current->pdeath_signal . There is no reason to use this intermediate variable since valid_signal() takes a unsigned long argument, so it can handle being passed arg2 directly, and if the call to valid_signal is OK, then we know the value of arg2 is in the range zero to _NSIG and thus it'll easily fit in a plain int and thus there's no problem assigning it later to current->pdeath_signal (which is an int). The patch gets rid of the pointless variable `sig'. This reduces the size of kernel/sys.o in 2.6.13-rc6-mm1 by 32 bytes on my system. Patch has been compile tested, boot tested, and just to make damn sure I didn't break anything I wrote a quick test app that calls prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG ...) with the entire range of values for a unsigned long, and it behaves as expected with and without the patch. Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- kernel/sys.c | 6 ++---- 1 files changed, 2 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff -puN kernel/sys.c~remove-a-redundant-variable-in-sys_prctl kernel/sys.c --- devel/kernel/sys.c~remove-a-redundant-variable-in-sys_prctl 2005-08-20 17:55:25.000000000 -0700 +++ devel-akpm/kernel/sys.c 2005-08-20 17:55:25.000000000 -0700 @@ -1711,7 +1711,6 @@ asmlinkage long sys_prctl(int option, un unsigned long arg4, unsigned long arg5) { long error; - int sig; error = security_task_prctl(option, arg2, arg3, arg4, arg5); if (error) @@ -1719,12 +1718,11 @@ asmlinkage long sys_prctl(int option, un switch (option) { case PR_SET_PDEATHSIG: - sig = arg2; - if (!valid_signal(sig)) { + if (!valid_signal(arg2)) { error = -EINVAL; break; } - current->pdeath_signal = sig; + current->pdeath_signal = arg2; break; case PR_GET_PDEATHSIG: error = put_user(current->pdeath_signal, (int __user *)arg2); _