Re: Serious flaw in glibc ?

David Holland (dholland@cs.toronto.edu)
Wed, 14 Oct 1998 14:40:48 -0400

> The real bug is the lack of means to get a reliable race-condition-free
> pointer at the file without actually opening it.
>
> What about something like this?
>
> fd = open(path, O_RDONLY | O_DEFEROPEN);

In the VINO operating system you can open files for neither reading
nor writing, which is useful for precisely this purpose.

(It also makes the kernel API half as wide, because you can implement
e.g. stat in terms of open, fstat, and close. Whether this produces a
significant performance problem or not hasn't been determined yet.)

-- 
   - David A. Holland             | (please continue to send non-list mail to
     dholland@cs.utoronto.ca      | dholland@hcs.harvard.edu. yes, I moved.)


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