Hi Stephen,
The other recent thread on F_SETLEASE prompted me to go
and recheck another blemish in the file lease code,
which still exists: viz leases and fork().
Via its inherited file descriptors, a child of fork() inherits
a reference to the file leases held by the parent (file leases
are maintained in the open file table). The following details
are relevant:
-- The file lease is registered only to the parent (as seen
in /proc/locks). If a lease breaker arrives, only the
parent is signalled.
-- If no explicit F_SETLEASE is done to remove a lease, then
the lease is only removed when all file descriptors referring
to the open file table entry are closed.
These two factors lead to various weirdnesses. Some examples:
1. If the parent closes its file descriptor, or simply terminates,
then the lease continues exist (because of the child's open
descriptor). However, if a lease breaker arrives, the
kernel does not know what process to signal: the child is not
signalled and the lease breaker's open() (or truncate()) is
blocked until /proc/sys/fs/lease-break-time expires (default
of 45 seconds), at which point the kernel forcibly breaks or
downgrades the lease, allowing the lease breaker to proceed.
2. Suppose a parent does the following:
-- opens a file, yielding a file descriptor fd
-- calls fork()
-- and the child takes out a lease on fd, and then exits
At this point, the lease continues to exist (because of
the *parent's* open file descriptor). If a lease breaker
arrives, then as above, no process is signalled (the lease
is marked as belonging to the now dead child, as can be
seen in /proc/locks), and the lease breaker blocks until
/proc/sys/fs/lease-break-time expires.
What are the intended semantics of file leases with respect
to fork()? I realize that file leases were designed with
SAMBA in mind, and fork() probably wasn't part of the
original vision, but the current semantics seem broken and
confusing. Simplest would perhaps be that a child did not
inherit a reference to the same lease, but I'm not sure
how achievable that would be in the existing design.
Cheers,
Michael
--
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