In commit 3975b097e5 ("convert stream-like files -> stream_open, even
if they use noop_llseek") Kirill used a coccinelle script to change
"nonseekable_open()" to "stream_open()", which changed the trivial cases
of stream-like file descriptors to the new model with FMODE_STREAM.
However, the two big cases - sockets and pipes - don't actually have
that trivial pattern at all, and were thus never converted to
FMODE_STREAM even though it makes lots of sense to do so.
That's particularly true when looking forward to the next change:
getting rid of FMODE_ATOMIC_POS entirely, and just using FMODE_STREAM to
decide whether f_pos updates are needed or not. And if they are, we'll
always do them atomically.
This came up because KCSAN (correctly) noted that the non-locked f_pos
updates are data races: they are clearly benign for the case where we
don't care, but it would be good to just not have that issue exist at
all.
Note that the reason we used FMODE_ATOMIC_POS originally is that only
doing it for the minimal required case is "safer" in that it's possible
that the f_pos locking can cause unnecessary serialization across the
whole write() call. And in the worst case, that kind of serialization
can cause deadlock issues: think writers that need readers to empty the
state using the same file descriptor.
[ Note that the locking is per-file descriptor - because it protects
"f_pos", which is obviously per-file descriptor - so it only affects
cases where you literally use the same file descriptor to both read
and write.
So a regular pipe that has separate reading and writing file
descriptors doesn't really have this situation even though it's the
obvious case of "reader empties what a bit writer concurrently fills"
But we want to make pipes as being stream-line anyway, because we
don't want the unnecessary overhead of locking, and because a named
pipe can be (ab-)used by reading and writing to the same file
descriptor. ]
There are likely a lot of other cases that might want FMODE_STREAM, and
looking for ".llseek = no_llseek" users and other cases that don't have
an lseek file operation at all and making them use "stream_open()" might
be a good idea. But pipes and sockets are likely to be the two main
cases.
Cc: Kirill Smelkov <kirr@nexedi.com>
Cc: Eic Dumazet <edumazet@google.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Cc: Marco Elver <elver@google.com>
Cc: Andrea Parri <parri.andrea@gmail.com>
Cc: Paul McKenney <paulmck@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
d8e464ecc1