LWN.net's Journal

[$] Making EPERM friendlier
Error reporting from the kernel (and low-level system libraries such as
the C library) has been a primitive affair since the earliest UNIX
systems. One of the consequences of this is that end users and system
administrators often encounter error messages that provide quite limited
information about the cause of the error, making it difficult to diagnose
the underlying problem. Some recent discussions on the libc-alpha and Linux
kernel mailing lists were started by developers who would like to improve
this state of affairs by having the kernel provide more detailed error
information to user space.