Possible readdir regression with BTRFS

Ian Johnson
2023-09-09T01:18:22Z

I was debugging an issue recently and came across what seems to be a
change in the behavior of opendir and readdir in Btrfs seemingly
starting with 9b378f6ad48cfa195ed868db9123c09ee7ec5ea2, specifically
when the contents of a directory are changed between the call to opendir
and the initial call to readdir. The following C program demonstrates
the behavior:

#import <dirent.h>
#import <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
DIR *dir = opendir("test");

FILE *file;
file = fopen("test/1", "w");
fwrite("1", 1, 1, file);
fclose(file);

file = fopen("test/2", "w");
fwrite("2", 1, 1, file);
fclose(file);

/* rewinddir(dir); */

struct dirent *entry;
while ((entry = readdir(dir))) {
printf("%s\n", entry->d_name);
}
closedir(dir);
return 0;
}

Running this program with an initially empty test directory will print
entry 1 but not entry 2 on Btrfs, while on Ext4 it prints both entries.

Evidently this particular result is not an issue, as POSIX states:

> If a file is removed from or added to the directory after the most
> recent call to opendir() or rewinddir(), whether a subsequent call to
> readdir_r() returns an entry for that file is unspecified.

However, the same program with rewinddir uncommented above yields the
same behavior, seemingly in contradiction of POSIX:

> It [rewinddir] shall also cause the directory stream to refer to the
> current state of the corresponding directory, as a call to opendir()
> would have done.

I know that the functions used here are part of the C library and not
the kernel, but given this seems to be a recent change, I wanted to
bring this up. I looked over the man pages for getdents and lseek and
didn't see any mention of guarantees (or lack thereof) in the face of
concurrent directory updates, so it's quite possible that this is within
the realm of expected/allowed behavior.