On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 05:38 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Monday 28 January 2008 05:13:09 Trond Myklebust wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, 2008-01-28 at 03:58 +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> > > The problem is that it's not a race in who gets to do its thing first, 
> > > but a 
> > > parallel reader can actually see a corrupted value from the two 
> > > independent 
> > > words on 32bit (e.g. during a 4GB). And this could actually completely 
> > > corrupt 
> > > f_pos when it happens with two racing relative seeks or read/write()s
> > > 
> > > I would consider that a bug.
> > 
> > I disagree. The corruption occurs because this isn't a situation that is
> > allowed by either POSIX or SUSv2/v3. Exactly what spec are you referring
> > to here?
> 
> No specific spec, just general quality of implementation. We normally don't 
> have
> non thread safe system calls even if it was in theory allowed by some 
> specification.

We've had the existing implementation for quite some time. The arguments
against changing it have been the same all along: if your application
wants to share files between threads, the portability argument implies
that you should either use pread/pwrite or use a mutex or some other
form of synchronisation primitive in order to ensure that
lseek()/read()/write() do not overlap.

Cheers
  Trond
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