On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 17:27 +0000, Myklebust, Trond wrote: > On Wed, 2013-02-20 at 12:04 -0500, Chuck Lever wrote: > > > Yes, but AF_LOCAL is supposed to be a generic transport for RPC. This is not a feature we just made up, it's actually a well-defined API that exists on other platforms (it's even specified in RFCs). Right now I would hesitate to restrict the use of AF_LOCAL upcalls to only synchronous contexts, because eventually we may want to use the transport in asynchronous contexts. > > The whole problem is that it is a piss-poorly defined feature in an > asynchronous kernel context. > > Sockets carry around a well defined net namespace context that allow > them to resolve IP addresses. However they carry none of the file > namespace context information that is required to make sense of AF_LOCAL > "addresses". > > IOW we have 3 options: > > 1. Drop AF_LOCAL support altogether > 2. Add file namespace context to the RPC or socket layers > 3. Drop asynchronous support, so that we have a reliable > userspace-defined context. > > 1) involves a user space api change, which will bring down the iron fist > of the Finn. > 2) involves cooperation from the VFS and socket folks which doesn't seem > to be happening. > > so that leaves (3), which is perfectly doable since we do _not_ want to > expose the rpc layer to anything outside the kernel. It's not intended > as a generic libtirpc... > > > If we were to go with using a synchronous connect, however, I think there should be some kind of safety check to make sure the xs connect function is not being invoked from an asynchronous context. This is a restriction that does not exist for other transports supported by the kernel RPC client, so it should be underscored in the code. > > void xs_connect_local(struct rpc_task *task) > { > if (RPC_IS_ASYNC(task)) > rpc_exit(task, -ENOTCONN); > ..... > } > > ...done. > This seems the most reasonable approach to me too, and makes the code simpler for now. Simo. -- Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-nfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html