Re: Update of file offset on write() etc. is non-atomic with I/O

[Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, Mar 03, 2014 at 03:34:43PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 3, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Umm...   I would be very surprised if that worked well.  You have just
> > forced fdget() to comply to the ABI.  And unless that has such structs
> > returned in register pairs, there's no way for compiler to do about
> > that.
> 
> Register pairs are very much a common return model.
> 
> And we've relied on that before. For example, 64-bit pte's on x86-32
> very much does that whole thing with the "pte_t" union.
> 
> So you can now commence being surprised.
> 
> (Side note: I think sparc or something doesn't support it, and may
> return things in memory. I can't really seem to find it in myself to
> care)

sparc64 actually does support that.  So does amd64, and, with explicit
flag, i386.  No other more or less general purpose architecture does.

Not ppc.  Not mips.  Not arm.  I think that some of those are worth
caring about...