vfs: add RENAME_NOREPLACE flag

If this flag is specified and the target of the rename exists then the
rename syscall fails with EEXIST.

The VFS does the existence checking, so it is trivial to enable for most
local filesystems.  This patch only enables it in ext4.

For network filesystems the VFS check is not enough as there may be a race
between a remote create and the rename, so these filesystems need to handle
this flag in their ->rename() implementations to ensure atomicity.

Andy writes about why this is useful:

"The trivial answer: to eliminate the race condition from 'mv -i'.

Another answer: there's a common pattern to atomically create a file
with contents: open a temporary file, write to it, optionally fsync
it, close it, then link(2) it to the final name, then unlink the
temporary file.

The reason to use link(2) is because it won't silently clobber the destination.

This is annoying:
 - It requires an extra system call that shouldn't be necessary.
 - It doesn't work on (IMO sensible) filesystems that don't support
hard links (e.g. vfat).
 - It's not atomic -- there's an intermediate state where both files exist.
 - It's ugly.

The new rename flag will make this totally sensible.

To be fair, on new enough kernels, you can also use O_TMPFILE and
linkat to achieve the same thing even more cleanly."

Suggested-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> 
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/ext4/namei.c b/fs/ext4/namei.c
index d050e043e88..5f19171b3e1 100644
--- a/fs/ext4/namei.c
+++ b/fs/ext4/namei.c
@@ -3204,6 +3204,16 @@ end_rename:
 	return retval;
 }
 
+static int ext4_rename2(struct inode *old_dir, struct dentry *old_dentry,
+			struct inode *new_dir, struct dentry *new_dentry,
+			unsigned int flags)
+{
+	if (flags & ~RENAME_NOREPLACE)
+		return -EINVAL;
+
+	return ext4_rename(old_dir, old_dentry, new_dir, new_dentry);
+}
+
 /*
  * directories can handle most operations...
  */
@@ -3218,6 +3228,7 @@ const struct inode_operations ext4_dir_inode_operations = {
 	.mknod		= ext4_mknod,
 	.tmpfile	= ext4_tmpfile,
 	.rename		= ext4_rename,
+	.rename2	= ext4_rename2,
 	.setattr	= ext4_setattr,
 	.setxattr	= generic_setxattr,
 	.getxattr	= generic_getxattr,