Re: file offset corruption on 32-bit machines?

[Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>]

> Martin Mares wrote:
> > > [*] file_pos_{read,write} (fs/read_write.c) are not called under
> > > lock (in sys_read, sys_write, ...), so even if f_pos is written
> > > atomically, you will be able to get races when accessing shared
> > > descriptor from different threads.
> > 
> > There are however cases when such behavior is perfectly valid: For example
> > you can have a file of records of a fixed size, whose order does not matter.
> > Then multiple processes can produce the records in parallel, sharing
> > a single fd.
> 
> A rather more common thing:
> 
> Does this problem apply when appending lines or records to a log file,
> with or without O_APPEND?
  O_APPEND works correctly in all cases (it ignores f_pos in the
descriptor). Without O_APPEND you can hit the race (but I'd like to see
a sensible use case of this ;).

> Also, can this problem affect programs doing concurrent reads/writes
> using pread/pwrite (or the AIO equivalents)?
  As Matthew said, pread/pwrite are safe, parallel read can hit the race,
write was described above...

									Honza
-- 
Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
SuSE CR Labs