Re: [PATCH v4 2/2] efi: an sysfs interface for user to update efi firmware

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Tue, 2015-04-21 at 20:24 -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:20 PM, James Bottomley
> <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 2015-04-21 at 18:58 -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> >> On Tue, Apr 21, 2015 at 6:21 PM, James Bottomley
> >> <James.Bottomley@hansenpartnership.com> wrote:
> >> > Andy, just on the misc device idea, what about triggering the capsule
> >> > update from close()?  In theory close returns an error code (not sure if
> >> > most tools actually check this, though).  That means we can do the write
> >> > in chunks but pass it in atomically on the close and cat will work
> >> > (provided it checks the return code of close).
> >>
> >> I thought about this but IIRC cat doesn't check the return value from close.
> >
> > It does in my copy (coreutils-8.23) :
> >
> >       if (!STREQ (infile, "-") && close (input_desc) < 0)
> >         {
> >           error (0, errno, "%s", infile);
> >           ok = false;
> >         }
> > [...]
> >   if (have_read_stdin && close (STDIN_FILENO) < 0)
> >     error (EXIT_FAILURE, errno, _("closing standard input"));
> >
> 
> True, but it's stdout that we care about, not stdin :(

Gosh you're determined to force me to wade through this source code,
aren't you?  That's handled in lib/closeout.c:

/* Close standard output.  On error, issue a diagnostic and _exit
   with status 'exit_failure'.

...


The point is that, admittedly much to my surprise, it all looks to be
handled by cat ... so we could proceed to have the transaction completed
in close in a misc device (or a sysfs file).

Unless there are any other rabbits you'd like to pull out of the hat?

James