Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 30 Oct 2013 22:18:56 +0100 | From | Yann Droneaud <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH v4 6/7] events: use get unused fd flag s(0) instead of get unused fd() |
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Hi,
Le 30.10.2013 21:20, Peter Zijlstra a écrit : > On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 08:47:46PM +0100, Yann Droneaud wrote: >> This patch replaces calls to get_unused_fd() with equivalent call to >> get_unused_fd_flags(0) to preserve current behavor for existing code. >> >> The hard coded flag value (0) should be reviewed on a per-subsystem >> basis, >> and, if possible, set to O_CLOEXEC. > > And how am I supposed to know if that is 'possible'? You provide a > total > number of 0 useful clues on how to determine this.
Fair.
Short: Will it break kernel ABI ? If no, use O_CLOEXEC, if yes, use 0.
Long: If userspace expect to retrieve a file descriptor with plain old Unix(tm) semantics, O_CLOEXEC must not be the default, as it could break some applications expecting that the file descriptor will be inherited during exec().
But for some subsystems, such as InfiniBand, KVM, VFIO, it make no sense to have file descriptors inherited since those are tied to resources that will vanish when a another program will replace the current one by mean of exec(), so it's safe to use O_CLOEXEC in such cases.
For others, like XFS, the file descriptor is retrieved by one program and will be used by a different program, executed as a child. In this case, setting O_CLOEXEC would break existing application, which do not expect to have to call fcntl(fd, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) to make it available across exec().
If file descriptor created by events subsystem are not tied to the current process resources, it's likely legal to use it in a different process context, thus O_CLOEXEC must not be the default.
Aside: If O_CLOEXEC cannot be made the default, it would be interesting to think to extend the API to have a (set of) function(s) taking a flags parameter so that userspace can set O_CLOEXEC if wanted. And I have a patch for this :)
PS: I like the title of this article: "Excuse me son, but your code is leaking !!!" [1] by Dan Walsh but one should probably read PEP-446 "Make newly created file descriptors non-inheritable" [2] instead since it has lot more background information on file descriptor leaking.
[1] http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/53603.html [2] http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0446/
Regards.
-- Yann Droneaud OPTEYA
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