On Fri, 23 May 2014, David Herrmann wrote: > On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 4:20 AM, Hugh Dickins <hughd@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > What is a front-FD? > > With 'front-FD' I refer to things like dma-buf: They allocate a > file-descriptor which is just a wrapper around a kernel-internal FD. > For instance, DRM-gem buffers exported as dma-buf. fops on the dma-buf > are forwarded to the shmem-fd of the given gem-object, but any access > to the inode of the dma-buf fd is a no-op as the dma-buf fd uses > anon-inode, not the shmem-inode. > > A previous revision of memfd used something like that, but that was > inherently racy. Thanks for explaining: then I guess you can leave "front-FD" out of the description next time around, in case there are others like me who are more mystified than enlightened by it. > > But this does highlight how the "size" arg to memfd_create() is > > perhaps redundant. Why give a size there, when size can be changed > > afterwards? I expect your answer is that many callers want to choose > > the size at the beginning, and would prefer to avoid the extra call. > > I'm not sure if that's a good enough reason for a redundant argument. > > At one point in time we might be required to support atomic-sealing. > So a memfd_create() call takes the initial seals as upper 32bits in > "flags" and sets them before returning the object. If these seals > contain SEAL_GROW/SHRINK, we must pass the size during setup (think > CLOEXEC with fork()). That does sound like over-design to me. You stop short of passing in an optional buffer of the data it's to contain, good. I think it would be a clearer interface without the size, but really that's an issue for the linux-api people you'll be Cc'ing next time. You say "think CLOEXEC with fork()": you have thought about this, I have not, please spell out for me what the atomic size guards against. Do you want an fd that's not shared across fork? > > Note that we spent a lot of time discussing whether such > atomic-sealing is necessary and no-one came up with a real race so > far. Therefore, I didn't include that. But especially if we add new > seals (like SHMEM_SEAL_OPEN, which I still think is not needed and > just hides real problems), we might at one point be required to > support that. That's also the reason why "flags" is 64bits. > > One might argue that we can just add memfd_create2() once that > happens, but I didn't see any harm in including "size" and making them > 64bit. I've not noticed another system call with 64-bit flags, it does seem over the top to me: the familiar ones all use int. But again, a matter for linux-api not for me. Hugh -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>