On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 11:26 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> wrote: > > That would be nice, but still won't work as we blindly copy f_flags > into F_GETFL, not even masking our internal FMODE_ bits. Ok, *that* is just silly of us, and we could try to just fix, and even backport. There's no possible valid use I could see where that should break (famous last words - user code does some damn odd things at times). Of course, that won't fix old kernels that are out there, but then neither would your original patch... Side note: I think you *can* detect the O_ATOMIC support by using F_SETFL, because F_SETFL only allows you to change flags that we recognize. So somebody who really wants to *guarantee* that O_ATOMIC is there and honored even with old kernels could presumable do something like fd = open(..); // *no* O_ATOMIC fcnt(fd, F_SETFL, O_ATOMIC); if (fcnt(fd, F_GETFL, NULL) & O_ATOMIC) // Yay! We actually got it else // I guess we need to fall back on old behavior although I agree that that is ridiculously inconvenient and not a great thing, and it's worth trying to aim for some better model. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html