vfs: atomic f_pos accesses as per POSIX

Our write() system call has always been atomic in the sense that you get
the expected thread-safe contiguous write, but we haven't actually
guaranteed that concurrent writes are serialized wrt f_pos accesses, so
threads (or processes) that share a file descriptor and use "write()"
concurrently would quite likely overwrite each others data.

This violates POSIX.1-2008/SUSv4 Section XSI 2.9.7 that says:

 "2.9.7 Thread Interactions with Regular File Operations

  All of the following functions shall be atomic with respect to each
  other in the effects specified in POSIX.1-2008 when they operate on
  regular files or symbolic links: [...]"

and one of the effects is the file position update.

This unprotected file position behavior is not new behavior, and nobody
has ever cared.  Until now.  Yongzhi Pan reported unexpected behavior to
Michael Kerrisk that was due to this.

This resolves the issue with a f_pos-specific lock that is taken by
read/write/lseek on file descriptors that may be shared across threads
or processes.

Reported-by: Yongzhi Pan <panyongzhi@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/open.c b/fs/open.c
index 4b3e1edf2fe4..b9ed8b25c108 100644
--- a/fs/open.c
+++ b/fs/open.c
@@ -705,6 +705,10 @@ static int do_dentry_open(struct file *f,
 		return 0;
 	}
 
+	/* POSIX.1-2008/SUSv4 Section XSI 2.9.7 */
+	if (S_ISREG(inode->i_mode))
+		f->f_mode |= FMODE_ATOMIC_POS;
+
 	f->f_op = fops_get(inode->i_fop);
 	if (unlikely(WARN_ON(!f->f_op))) {
 		error = -ENODEV;