[PATCH v3 0/7] Add O_DENY* support for VFS and CIFS/NFS

[Simo]

On 03/04/2013 04:19 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 01:53:25PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> [possible resend -- sorry]
>>
>> On 02/28/2013 07:25 AM, Pavel Shilovsky wrote:
>>> This patchset adds support of O_DENY* flags for Linux fs layer. These flags can be used by any application that needs share reservations to organize a file access. VFS already has some sort of this capability - now it's done through flock/LOCK_MAND mechanis, but that approach is non-atomic. This patchset build new capabilities on top of the existing one but doesn't bring any changes into the flock call semantic.
>>>
>>> These flags can be used by NFS (built-in-kernel) and CIFS (Samba) servers and Wine applications through VFS (for local filesystems) or CIFS/NFS modules. This will help when e.g. Samba and NFS server share the same directory for Windows and Linux users or Wine applications use Samba/NFS share to access the same data from different clients.
>>>
>>> According to the previous discussions the most problematic question is how to prevent situations like DoS attacks where e.g /lib/liba.so file can be open with DENYREAD, or smth like this. That's why one extra flag O_DENYMAND is added. It indicates to underlying layer that an application want to use O_DENY* flags semantic. It allows us not affect native Linux applications (that don't use O_DENYMAND flag) - so, these flags (and the semantic of open syscall that they bring) are used only for those applications that really want it proccessed that way.
>>>
>>> So, we have four new flags:
>>> O_DENYREAD - to prevent other opens with read access,
>>> O_DENYWRITE - to prevent other opens with write access,
>>> O_DENYDELETE - to prevent delete operations (this flag is not implemented in VFS and NFS part and only suitable for CIFS module),
>>> O_DENYMAND - to switch on/off three flags above.
>> O_DENYMAND doesn't deny anything.  Would a name like O_RESPECT_DENY be
>> better?
>>
>> Other than that, this seems like a sensible mechanism.
> I'm a little more worried: these are mandatory locks, and applications
> that use them are used to the locks being enforced correctly.  Are we
> sure that an application that opens a file O_DENYWRITE won't crash if it
> sees the file data change while it holds the open?

The redirector may simply assume it has full control of that part of the 
file and not read nor send data until the lock is released too, so you 
get conflicting views of the file contents between different clients if 
you let a mandatory lock not be mandatory.

> In general the idea of making a mandatory lock opt-in makes me nervous.
> I'd prefer something like a mount option, so that we know that everyone
> on that one filesystem is playing by the same rules, but we can still
> mount filesystems like / without the option.

+1

> But I'll admit I'm definitely not an expert on Windows locking and may
> be missing something about how these locks are meant to work.

Mandatory locks really are mandatory in Windows.
That may not be nice to a Unix system but what can you do ?

Simo.