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authorJeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>2014-02-03 12:13:10 -0500
committerJeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>2014-03-31 08:24:43 -0400
commit5d50ffd7c31dab47c6b828841ca1ec70a1b40169 (patch)
tree59e96edd1c263f82012387fe7b6f290db4fb8416 /fs/minix
parent57b65325fe34ec4c917bc4e555144b4a94d9e1f7 (diff)
locks: add new fcntl cmd values for handling file private locks
Due to some unfortunate history, POSIX locks have very strange and unhelpful semantics. The thing that usually catches people by surprise is that they are dropped whenever the process closes any file descriptor associated with the inode. This is extremely problematic for people developing file servers that need to implement byte-range locks. Developers often need a "lock management" facility to ensure that file descriptors are not closed until all of the locks associated with the inode are finished. Additionally, "classic" POSIX locks are owned by the process. Locks taken between threads within the same process won't conflict with one another, which renders them useless for synchronization between threads. This patchset adds a new type of lock that attempts to address these issues. These locks conflict with classic POSIX read/write locks, but have semantics that are more like BSD locks with respect to inheritance and behavior on close. This is implemented primarily by changing how fl_owner field is set for these locks. Instead of having them owned by the files_struct of the process, they are instead owned by the filp on which they were acquired. Thus, they are inherited across fork() and are only released when the last reference to a filp is put. These new semantics prevent them from being merged with classic POSIX locks, even if they are acquired by the same process. These locks will also conflict with classic POSIX locks even if they are acquired by the same process or on the same file descriptor. The new locks are managed using a new set of cmd values to the fcntl() syscall. The initial implementation of this converts these values to "classic" cmd values at a fairly high level, and the details are not exposed to the underlying filesystem. We may eventually want to push this handing out to the lower filesystem code but for now I don't see any need for it. Also, note that with this implementation the new cmd values are only available via fcntl64() on 32-bit arches. There's little need to add support for legacy apps on a new interface like this. Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
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