Re: [PATCH 1/6] statx: Add a system call to make enhanced file info available

Arnd Bergmann
2016-05-13T15:28:11Z

On Thursday 12 May 2016 02:11:41 Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 09:25:55AM +0100, David Howells wrote:
> > Because it's not necessarily a perfectly working version of it. See the Y2037
> > problem for example.
> >
> > I was assuming that C libraries might want to update the struct stat and the
> > stat call() to provide fields that aren't currently there in Linux but are in
> > other OS's. We could even dispense with older stat syscalls on new arches.
>
> Please stop this whole let's get rid of old syscalls on new
> architectures stuff. This just means we have to do the translation
> multiple, and the one in userspace is more costly as we it needs to be
> in every copy of the library. And times where we had a single libc
> instance (nevermind implementation) are long over if we ever actually
> had them.

I'm trying to understand what that means for the 64-bit time_t syscalls.

The patch series I did last year had a replacement 'sys_newfstatat()'
syscall but IIRC no other stat variant, the idea being that we would
only need to provide this one to the libc and have user space emulate
the stat/fstat/lstat/fstatat variants based on that.
With the statx introduction, I was hoping to no longer have to add
that syscall but instead have libc do everything on top of sys_statx().

Do you think that is reasonable, given that we won't be allowed to
call any of the existing stat() variants for a y2038-safe libc build[1],
or should we plan to keep needing replacement fstatat (and possibly
stat/lstat/fstat) syscalls with 64-bit time_t even after statx() support
is merged into the kernel.

Arnd

[1] the glibc developers plan to allow compatibility for 32-bit time_t
and 64-bit time_t in the same binary, but any user space code built
with 64-bit time_t must never call into kernel interfaces that use
a 32-bit time_t.
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