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Subject: Re: [PATCH 04/23] vfs: Introduce infrastructure for revoking a file
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From: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Date: Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:03:29 +0200
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Hi Eric,

Very interesting work.

On Mon,  1 Jun 2009, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> The file_hotplug_lock has a very unique implementation necessitated by
> the need to have no performance impact on existing code.  Classic locking
> primitives and reference counting cause pipeline stalls, except for rcu
> which provides no ability to preventing reading a data structure while
> it is being updated.

Well, the simple solution to that is to add another level of indirection:

old:

  fdtable -> file

new:

  fdtable -> persistent_file -> file

Then it is possible to replace persistent_file->file with a revoked
one under RCU.  This has the added advantage that it supports
arbitrary file replacements, not just ones which return EIO.

Another advantage is that dereferencing can normally be done "under
the hood" in fget()/fget_light().  Only code which wants to
permanently store a file pointer (like the SCM_RIGHTS thing) would
need to be aware of the extra complexity.

Would that work, do you think?

Thanks,
Miklos

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