[PATCH] vfs: *at functions: core

Here is a series of patches which introduce in total 13 new system calls
which take a file descriptor/filename pair instead of a single file
name.  These functions, openat etc, have been discussed on numerous
occasions.  They are needed to implement race-free filesystem traversal,
they are necessary to implement a virtual per-thread current working
directory (think multi-threaded backup software), etc.

We have in glibc today implementations of the interfaces which use the
/proc/self/fd magic.  But this code is rather expensive.  Here are some
results (similar to what Jim Meyering posted before).

The test creates a deep directory hierarchy on a tmpfs filesystem.  Then
rm -fr is used to remove all directories.  Without syscall support I get
this:

real    0m31.921s
user    0m0.688s
sys     0m31.234s

With syscall support the results are much better:

real    0m20.699s
user    0m0.536s
sys     0m20.149s

The interfaces are for obvious reasons currently not much used.  But they'll
be used.  coreutils (and Jeff's posixutils) are already using them.
Furthermore, code like ftw/fts in libc (maybe even glob) will also start using
them.  I expect a patch to make follow soon.  Every program which is walking
the filesystem tree will benefit.

Signed-off-by: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fcntl.h b/include/linux/fcntl.h
index 8a7c82151de9..c52a63755fdd 100644
--- a/include/linux/fcntl.h
+++ b/include/linux/fcntl.h
@@ -23,6 +23,13 @@
 #define DN_ATTRIB	0x00000020	/* File changed attibutes */
 #define DN_MULTISHOT	0x80000000	/* Don't remove notifier */
 
+#define AT_FDCWD		-100    /* Special value used to indicate
+                                           openat should use the current
+                                           working directory. */
+#define AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW	0x100   /* Do not follow symbolic links.  */
+#define AT_REMOVEDIR		0x200   /* Remove directory instead of
+                                           unlinking file.  */
+
 #ifdef __KERNEL__
 
 #ifndef force_o_largefile