Hello!
(I sent this e-mail two weeks ago with no feedback. Does anyone care?
Wrong mailing list? Anything....?)
Seeking (to an offset within file size) in /proc/meminfo is broken in
4.19.59. It does seek to a desired position, but reading from that
position returns the remainder of file and then a whole copy of file.
This doesn't happen with /proc/vmstat or /proc/self/maps for example.
Seeking did work correctly in kernel 4.14.47. So it seems something
broke in the way.
Background: this kind of access pattern (seeking to /proc/meminfo) is
used by libvirt-lxc fuse driver for virtualized view of /proc/meminfo.
So that /proc/meminfo is broken in guests when running kernel 4.19.x.
$ ./test /proc/meminfo 0 # Works as expected
MemTotal: 394907728 kB
MemFree: 173738328 kB
...
DirectMap2M: 13062144 kB
DirectMap1G: 390070272 kB
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
$ ./test 1024 # returns a copy of file after the remainder
Will seek to 1024
Data read at offset 1024
gePages: 0 kB
ShmemHugePages: 0 kB
ShmemPmdMapped: 0 kB
HugePages_Total: 0
HugePages_Free: 0
HugePages_Rsvd: 0
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
Hugetlb: 0 kB
DirectMap4k: 245204 kB
DirectMap2M: 13062144 kB
DirectMap1G: 390070272 kB
MemTotal: 394907728 kB
MemFree: 173738328 kB
MemAvailable: 379989680 kB
Buffers: 355812 kB
Cached: 207216224 kB
...
DirectMap2M: 13062144 kB
DirectMap1G: 390070272 kB
As you see, after "DirectMap1G:" line, a whole copy of /proc/meminfo
returned by "read".
Test program:
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#define SIZE 1024
char buf[SIZE + 1];
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
int fd;
ssize_t rd;
off_t ofs = 0;
if (argc < 2) {
printf("Usage: test <file> [<offset>]\n");
exit(1);
}
if (-1 == (fd = open(argv[1], O_RDONLY))) {
perror("open failed");
exit(1);
}
if (argc > 2) {
ofs = atol(argv[2]);
}
printf("Will seek to %ld\n", ofs);
if (-1 == (lseek(fd, ofs, SEEK_SET))) {
perror("lseek failed");
exit(1);
}
for (;; ofs += rd) {
printf("\n\nData read at offset %ld\n", ofs);
if (-1 == (rd = read(fd, buf, SIZE))) {
perror("read failed");
exit(1);
}
buf[rd] = '\0';
printf(buf);
if (rd < SIZE) {
break;
}
}
return 0;
}