[PATCH] vfs: *at functions: core

Here is a series of patches which introduce in total 13 new system calls
which take a file descriptor/filename pair instead of a single file
name.  These functions, openat etc, have been discussed on numerous
occasions.  They are needed to implement race-free filesystem traversal,
they are necessary to implement a virtual per-thread current working
directory (think multi-threaded backup software), etc.

We have in glibc today implementations of the interfaces which use the
/proc/self/fd magic.  But this code is rather expensive.  Here are some
results (similar to what Jim Meyering posted before).

The test creates a deep directory hierarchy on a tmpfs filesystem.  Then
rm -fr is used to remove all directories.  Without syscall support I get
this:

real    0m31.921s
user    0m0.688s
sys     0m31.234s

With syscall support the results are much better:

real    0m20.699s
user    0m0.536s
sys     0m20.149s

The interfaces are for obvious reasons currently not much used.  But they'll
be used.  coreutils (and Jeff's posixutils) are already using them.
Furthermore, code like ftw/fts in libc (maybe even glob) will also start using
them.  I expect a patch to make follow soon.  Every program which is walking
the filesystem tree will benefit.

Signed-off-by: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index b77f2608eef..84bb449b9b0 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -1340,7 +1340,8 @@ static inline int break_lease(struct inode *inode, unsigned int mode)
 
 extern int do_truncate(struct dentry *, loff_t start, unsigned int time_attrs,
 		       struct file *filp);
-extern long do_sys_open(const char __user *filename, int flags, int mode);
+extern long do_sys_open(int fdf, const char __user *filename, int flags,
+			int mode);
 extern struct file *filp_open(const char *, int, int);
 extern struct file * dentry_open(struct dentry *, struct vfsmount *, int);
 extern int filp_close(struct file *, fl_owner_t id);
@@ -1479,7 +1480,7 @@ static inline void allow_write_access(struct file *file)
 }
 extern int do_pipe(int *);
 
-extern int open_namei(const char *, int, int, struct nameidata *);
+extern int open_namei(int dfd, const char *, int, int, struct nameidata *);
 extern int may_open(struct nameidata *, int, int);
 
 extern int kernel_read(struct file *, unsigned long, char *, unsigned long);
@@ -1677,6 +1678,8 @@ extern int vfs_readdir(struct file *, filldir_t, void *);
 
 extern int vfs_stat(char __user *, struct kstat *);
 extern int vfs_lstat(char __user *, struct kstat *);
+extern int vfs_stat_fd(int dfd, char __user *, struct kstat *);
+extern int vfs_lstat_fd(int dfd, char __user *, struct kstat *);
 extern int vfs_fstat(unsigned int, struct kstat *);
 
 extern int vfs_ioctl(struct file *, unsigned int, unsigned int, unsigned long);