On Monday 01 October 2007 00:11, Davide Libenzi wrote:
> On Sun, 30 Sep 2007, Denys Vlasenko wrote:
>
> > Hi Ulrich,
> >
> > On Friday 28 September 2007 18:34, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> > > One more small change to extend the availability of creation of
> > > file descriptors with FD_CLOEXEC set. Adding a new command to
> > > fcntl() requires no new system call and the overall impact on
> > > code size if minimal.
> >
> > Tangential question: do you have any idea how userspace can
> > safely do nonblocking read or write on a potentially-shared fd?
> >
> > IIUC, currently it cannot be done without races:
> >
> > old_flags = fcntl(fd, F_GETFL);
> > ...other process may change flags!...
> > fcntl(fd, F_SETFL, old_flags | O_NONBLOCK);
> > read(fd, ...)
> > ...other process may see flags changed under its feet!...
> > fcntl(fd, F_SETFL, old_flags);
> >
> > Can this be fixed?
>
> I'm not sure I understood correctly your use case. But, if you have two
> processes/threads randomly switching O_NONBLOCK on/off, your problems
> arise not only the F_SETFL time.
My use case is: I want to do a nonblocking read on descriptor 0 (stdin).
It may be a pipe or a socket.
There may be other processes which share this descriptor with me,
I simply cannot know that. And they, too, may want to do reads on it.
I want to do nonblocking read in such a way that neither those other
processes will ever see fd switching to O_NONBLOCK and back, and
I also want to be safe from other processes doing the same.
I don't see how this can be done using standard unix primitives.
--
vda
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