From: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
To: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, hch@lst.de, tytso@mit.edu,
adilger.kernel@dilger.ca, darrick.wong@oracle.com, clm@fb.com,
josef@toxicpanda.com, dsterba@suse.com,
linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, linux-xfs@vger.kernel.org,
linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Making linkat() able to overwrite the target
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:02:50 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200114170250.GA8904@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3326.1579019665@warthog.procyon.org.uk>
On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 04:34:25PM +0000, David Howells wrote:
> With my rewrite of fscache and cachefiles:
>
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/dhowells/linux-fs.git/log/?h=fscache-iter
>
> when a file gets invalidated by the server - and, under some circumstances,
> modified locally - I have the cache create a temporary file with vfs_tmpfile()
> that I'd like to just link into place over the old one - but I can't because
> vfs_link() doesn't allow you to do that. Instead I have to either unlink the
> old one and then link the new one in or create it elsewhere and rename across.
>
> Would it be possible to make linkat() take a flag, say AT_LINK_REPLACE, that
> causes the target to be replaced and not give EEXIST? Or make it so that
> rename() can take a tmpfile as the source and replace the target with that. I
> presume that, either way, this would require journal changes on ext4, xfs and
> btrfs.
Umm... I don't like the idea of linkat() doing that - you suddenly get new
fun cases to think about (what should happen when the target is a mountpoint,
for starters?) _and_ you would have to add a magical flag to vfs_link() so
that it would know which tests to do. As for rename... How would that
work? AT_EMPTY_PATH for source? What happens if two threads do that
at the same time? Should that case be always "create a new link, even
if you've got it by plain lookup somewhere"? Worse, suppose you do that
to given tmpfile; what should happen to /proc/self/fd/* link to it? Should
it point to new location, or...?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-01-14 17:03 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-01-14 16:34 Making linkat() able to overwrite the target David Howells
2020-01-14 17:02 ` Al Viro [this message]
2020-01-14 18:06 ` David Howells
2020-01-14 19:37 ` Miklos Szeredi
2020-01-17 0:46 ` Colin Walters
2020-01-17 9:57 ` Amir Goldstein
2020-01-17 11:42 ` David Howells
2020-01-17 16:22 ` Omar Sandoval
2020-01-17 16:39 ` David Howells
2020-01-15 8:36 ` Christoph Hellwig
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