Re: New copyfile system call - discuss before LSF?

Andy Lutomirski
2013-03-30T22:41:19Z

On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> > I thought the first thing people would ask for is to atomically create a
>> > new file and copy the old file into it (at least on local file systems).
>> > The idea is that nothing should see an empty destination file, either
>> > by race or by crash. (This feature would perhaps be described as a
>> > pony, but it should be implementable.)
>>
>> Having already wasted many week trying to implement your pony, I would
>> consider it about as possible as winning the lottery three times in a
>> row. It clearly is in theory and yet,...
>
> Hmm, really? AFAICT it would be simple to provide open_deleted_file("directory")
> syscall. You'd open_deleted_file(), copy source file into it, then
> fsync(), then link it into filesystem.

Isn't linking a deleted file back into the filesystem explicitly
forbidden? I'm pretty sure that linking from /proc/fd/whatever
doesn't work. (I've often wanted a flink system call that takes a
file descriptor and links it somewhere. If it came with an option to
control whether it would overwrite an existing file, even better.)

--Andy