Re: [BUG] copy_file_range with sysfs file as input

[Ian Lance Taylor <iant@google.com>]

Thanks for the note.  I'm not a kernel developer, but to me this
sounds like a kernel bug.  It seems particularly unfortunate that
copy_file_range returns 0 in this case.  From the perspective of the
Go standard library, what we would need is some mechanism to detect
when the copy_file_range system call will not or did not work
correctly.  As the biggest hammer, we currently only call
copy_file_range on kernel versions 5.3 and newer.  We can bump that
requirement if necessary.

Please feel free to open a bug about this at https://golang.org/issue,
but we'll need guidance as to what we should do to avoid the problem.
Thanks.

Ian

On Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 11:54 PM Nicolas Boichat <drinkcat@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> Hi copy_file_range experts,
>
> We hit this interesting issue when upgrading Go compiler from 1.13 to
> 1.15 [1]. Basically we use Go's `io.Copy` to copy the content of
> `/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace` to a temporary file.
>
> Under the hood, Go now uses `copy_file_range` syscall to optimize the
> copy operation. However, that fails to copy any content when the input
> file is from sysfs/tracefs, with an apparent size of 0 (but there is
> still content when you `cat` it, of course).
>
> A repro case is available in comment7 (adapted from the man page),
> also copied below [2].
>
> Output looks like this (on kernels 5.4.89 (chromeos), 5.7.17 and
> 5.10.3 (chromeos))
> $ ./copyfrom /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace x
> 0 bytes copied
> $ cat x
> $ cat /sys/kernel/debug/tracing/trace
> # tracer: nop
> #
> # entries-in-buffer/entries-written: 0/0   #P:8
> #
> #                                _-----=> irqs-off
> #                               / _----=> need-resched
> #                              | / _---=> hardirq/softirq
> #                              || / _--=> preempt-depth
> #                              ||| /     delay
> #           TASK-PID     CPU#  ||||   TIMESTAMP  FUNCTION
> #              | |         |   ||||      |         |
>
> I can try to dig further, but thought you'd like to get a bug report
> as soon as possible.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Nicolas
>
> [1] http://issuetracker.google.com/issues/178332739
> [2]
> #define _GNU_SOURCE
> #include <fcntl.h>
> #include <stdio.h>
> #include <stdlib.h>
> #include <sys/stat.h>
> #include <sys/syscall.h>
> #include <unistd.h>
>
> int
> main(int argc, char **argv)
> {
>         int fd_in, fd_out;
>         loff_t ret;
>
>         if (argc != 3) {
>                 fprintf(stderr, "Usage: %s <source> <destination>\n", argv[0]);
>                 exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
>         }
>
>         fd_in = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY);
>         if (fd_in == -1) {
>                 perror("open (argv[1])");
>                 exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
>         }
>
>         fd_out = open(argv[2], O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC, 0644);
>         if (fd_out == -1) {
>                 perror("open (argv[2])");
>                 exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
>         }
>
>         ret = copy_file_range(fd_in, NULL, fd_out, NULL, 1024, 0);
>         if (ret == -1) {
>                 perror("copy_file_range");
>                 exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
>         }
>         printf("%d bytes copied\n", (int)ret);
>
>         close(fd_in);
>         close(fd_out);
>         exit(EXIT_SUCCESS);
> }