Re: [PATCH v2 2/3] shm: add memfd_create() syscall

[Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>]

On Fri, 23 May 2014, David Herrmann wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 4:20 AM, Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> 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

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