On Mon, Mar 02, 2020 at 12:52:39PM +0100, Christian Brauner wrote: > On Mon, Mar 02, 2020 at 12:30:47PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > > * Christian Brauner: > > > > > [Cc Florian since that ends up on libc's table sooner or later...] > > > > I'm not sure what you are after here … > > Exactly what you've commented below. Input on whether any of these > changes would be either problematic if you e.g. were to implement > openat() on top of openat2() in the future or if it would be problematic > if we e.g. were to really deprecate AT_* flags for new syscalls. > > > > > > On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 02:53:32PM +0000, David Howells wrote: > > >> > > >> I've been told that RESOLVE_* flags, which can be found in linux/openat2.h, > > >> should be used instead of the equivalent AT_* flags for new system calls. Is > > >> this the case? > > > > > > Imho, it would make sense to use RESOLVE_* flags for new system calls > > > and afair this was the original intention. > > > The alternative is that RESOLVE_* flags are special to openat2(). But > > > that seems strange, imho. The semantics openat2() has might be very > > > useful for new system calls as well which might also want to support > > > parts of AT_* flags (see fsinfo()). So we either end up adding new AT_* > > > flags mirroring the new RESOLVE_* flags or we end up adding new > > > RESOLVE_* flags mirroring parts of AT_* flags. And if that's a > > > possibility I vote for RESOLVE_* flags going forward. The have better > > > naming too imho. > > > > > > An argument against this could be that we might end up causing more > > > confusion for userspace due to yet another set of flags. But maybe this > > > isn't an issue as long as we restrict RESOLVE_* flags to new syscalls. > > > When we introduce a new syscall userspace will have to add support for > > > it anyway. > > > > I missed the start of the dicussion and what this is about, sorry. > > > > Regarding open flags, I think the key point for future APIs is to avoid > > using the set of flags for both control of the operation itself > > (O_NOFOLLOW/AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW, O_NOCTTY) and properaties of the > > resulting descriptor (O_RDWR, O_SYNC). I expect that doing that would Yeah, we have touched on that already and we have other APIs having related problems. A clean way to avoid this problem is to require new syscalls to either have two flag arguments, or - if appropriate - suggest they make use of struct open_how that was implemented for openat2(). * @flags: O_* flags. * @mode: O_CREAT/O_TMPFILE file mode. * @resolve: RESOLVE_* flags. */ struct open_how { __u64 flags; __u64 mode; __u64 resolve; };