[Linaro-mm-sig] Re: [PATCH] epoll: try to be a _bit_ better about file lifetimes

[Linus Torvalds]

On Wed, 8 May 2024 at 09:19, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds at linux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> So since we already have two versions of F_DUPFD (the other being
> F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC) I decided that the best thing to do is to just extend
> on that existing naming pattern, and called it F_DUPFD_QUERY instead.
>
> I'm not married to the name, so if somebody hates it, feel free to
> argue otherwise.

Side note: with this patch, doing

   ret = fcntl(fd1, F_DUPFD_QUERY, fd2);

will result in:

 -1 (EBADF): 'fd1' is not a valid file descriptor
 -1 (EINVAL): old kernel that doesn't support F_DUPFD_QUERY
 0: fd2 does not refer to the same file as fd1
 1: fd2 is the same 'struct file' as fd1

and it might be worth noting a couple of things here:

 (a) fd2 being an invalid file descriptor does not cause EBADF, it
just causes "does not match".

 (b) we *could* use more bits for more equality

IOW, it would possibly make sense to extend the 0/1 result to be

- bit #0: same file pointer
- bit #1: same path
- bit #2: same dentry
- bit #3: same inode

which are all different levels of "sameness".

Does anybody care? Do we want to extend on this "sameness"? I'm not
convinced, but it might be a good idea to document this as a possibly
future extension, ie *if* what you care about is "same file pointer",
maybe you should make sure to only look at bit #0.

               Linus