final decision about *at syscalls
- From: Roman Divacky <rdivacky@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:22:22 +0100
Dear arch@
Over this summer I was working (among other things) on *at family of syscalls
kindly sponsored by Google (in their Summer of Code). The resulting patch is
almost finished but I need to decide one design question. If you are not interested
in *at/namei feel free to skip this mail.
The *at syscalls are a threads-oriented extension to basic file syscalls (think
of open(), fstat(), etc.) adding the possibility to specify from where the search
for relative path should start.
image that we have /tmp/foo/bar
and CWD is set to "/tmp/", and the process has opened "foo" as dirfd. with ordinary
open() syscall you have to either
chdir("/tmp/foo");open("./bar");
or
open("/tmp/foo/bar");
The first approach is problematic because it changes CWD for all threads in the process,
the second is prone to race-conditions as some of the components of the path can
change in parallel with the "open".
So POSIX introduced a new API, called "Extended API set part 2, ISBN: 1-931624-67-4" (at
least this was the latest when I looked last time), which solves that by introducing "*at"
syscalls that supply an fd of previously opened directory which is used instead of CWD
for searching relative path, ie. the previous example becomes
dirfd = open("/tmp/foo"); openat("foo", dirfd);
I implemented the whole API as native FreeBSD syscalls + in linuxulator emulation layer.
Here's the problem:
There are two approaches to the name translation from "filedescriptor" to the "vnode".
1) we can do it in the kern_fooat() syscall and pass namei() the resulting vnode
2) we can pass namei() the filedescriptor and do the translation there
PROs of #1:
o namei() does not need to know about the curthread, you can use this *at
ability for different purposes, it's cleaner (imho)
PROs of #2
o raceless implementation
o no code duplication
CONs of #1
o some very small code duplication (the translation is done in every
kern_fooat() function)
o there is a race between the name translation and the actual use of the result
of the translation that needs to be handled, the "path_to_file" string is copied
to the kernel space twice hence a race
CONs of #2
o namei is made thread dependant
Please tell me what approach you like more. I personally favour #1 because I don't like namei()
being thread dependant, Kostik Belousov prefers #2.
I'd like to change the current patch to whatever you decide is the best (currently I implement #1)
and finally ship it for commiting.
thank you
Roman Divacky
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