summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/fs/fcntl.c
Commit message (Collapse)AuthorAgeFilesLines
* [PATCH] stale POSIX lock handlingPeter Staubach2005-07-271-2/+3
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | I believe that there is a problem with the handling of POSIX locks, which the attached patch should address. The problem appears to be a race between fcntl(2) and close(2). A multithreaded application could close a file descriptor at the same time as it is trying to acquire a lock using the same file descriptor. I would suggest that that multithreaded application is not providing the proper synchronization for itself, but the OS should still behave correctly. SUS3 (Single UNIX Specification Version 3, read: POSIX) indicates that when a file descriptor is closed, that all POSIX locks on the file, owned by the process which closed the file descriptor, should be released. The trick here is when those locks are released. The current code releases all locks which exist when close is processing, but any locks in progress are handled when the last reference to the open file is released. There are three cases to consider. One is the simple case, a multithreaded (mt) process has a file open and races to close it and acquire a lock on it. In this case, the close will release one reference to the open file and when the fcntl is done, it will release the other reference. For this situation, no locks should exist on the file when both the close and fcntl operations are done. The current system will handle this case because the last reference to the open file is being released. The second case is when the mt process has dup(2)'d the file descriptor. The close will release one reference to the file and the fcntl, when done, will release another, but there will still be at least one more reference to the open file. One could argue that the existence of a lock on the file after the close has completed is okay, because it was acquired after the close operation and there is still a way for the application to release the lock on the file, using an existing file descriptor. The third case is when the mt process has forked, after opening the file and either before or after becoming an mt process. In this case, each process would hold a reference to the open file. For each process, this degenerates to first case above. However, the lock continues to exist until both processes have released their references to the open file. This lock could block other lock requests. The changes to release the lock when the last reference to the open file aren't quite right because they would allow the lock to exist as long as there was a reference to the open file. This is too long. The new proposed solution is to add support in the fcntl code path to detect a race with close and then to release the lock which was just acquired when such as race is detected. This causes locks to be released in a timely fashion and for the system to conform to the POSIX semantic specification. This was tested by instrumenting a kernel to detect the handling locks and then running a program which generates case #3 above. A dangling lock could be reliably generated. When the changes to detect the close/fcntl race were added, a dangling lock could no longer be generated. Cc: Matthew Wilcox <willy@debian.org> Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
* [PATCH] convert that currently tests _NSIG directly to use valid_signal()Jesper Juhl2005-05-011-1/+2
| | | | | | | | | Convert most of the current code that uses _NSIG directly to instead use valid_signal(). This avoids gcc -W warnings and off-by-one errors. Signed-off-by: Jesper Juhl <juhl-lkml@dif.dk> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
* [PATCH] AYSNC IO using singals other than SIGIOBharath Ramesh2005-04-161-1/+1
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A question on sigwaitinfo based IO mechanism in multithreaded applications. I am trying to use RT signals to notify me of IO events using RT signals instead of SIGIO in a multithreaded applications. I noticed that there was some discussion on lkml during november 1999 with the subject of the discussion as "Signal driven IO". In the thread I noticed that RT signals were being delivered to the worker thread. I am running 2.6.10 kernel and I am trying to use the very same mechanism and I find that only SIGIO being propogated to the worker threads and RT signals only being propogated to the main thread and not the worker threads where I actually want them to be propogated too. On further inspection I found that the following patch which I have attached solves the problem. I am not sure if this is a bug or feature in the kernel. Roland McGrath <roland@redhat.com> said: This relates only to fcntl F_SETSIG, which is a Linux extension. So there is no POSIX issue. When changing various things like the normal SIGIO signalling to do group signals, I was concerned strictly with the POSIX semantics and generally avoided touching things in the domain of Linux inventions. That's why I didn't change this when I changed the call right next to it. There is no reason I can see that F_SETSIG-requested signals shouldn't use a group signal like normal SIGIO does. I'm happy to ACK this patch, there is nothing wrong with its change to the semantics in my book. But neither POSIX nor I care a whit what F_SETSIG does. Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
* Linux-2.6.12-rc2v2.6.12-rc2Linus Torvalds2005-04-161-0/+601
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history, even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about 3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good infrastructure for it. Let it rip!
OpenPOWER on IntegriCloud