On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 1:45 PM, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Um... That's odd - we *could* get there with f.need_put and > file_count(file) equal to 1, but why would we want to take > f_pos_lock in that case? Because that means that the file table is shared among threads. So another thread can access the struct file pointer and do a concurrent read() or write() on it, and so we need to lock f_pos. Basically, there are two cases: - duplicated file pointers due to fork(). That's the "file_count()" test. Yes, this will trigger even if they didn't fork, just dup'ed the file descriptor. We have no way of telling the difference, though. - concurrent access due to duplicated "struct file_table" pointers. This is the "need_put" test, since __fget_light() will have tested the proper files->count already. Both need f_pos_lock. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html