History log of /linux-master/include/uapi/linux/inotify.h
Revision Date Author Comments
# e2255550 05-Mar-2024 Vicki Pfau <vi@endrift.com>

inotify: Fix misspelling of "writable"

Several file system notification system headers have "writable"
misspelled as "writtable" in the comments. This patch fixes it in the
inotify header.

Signed-off-by: Vicki Pfau <vi@endrift.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Message-Id: <20240306020831.1404033-1-vi@endrift.com>


# 94dfc73e 06-Apr-2022 Gustavo A. R. Silva <gustavoars@kernel.org>

treewide: uapi: Replace zero-length arrays with flexible-array members

There is a regular need in the kernel to provide a way to declare
having a dynamically sized set of trailing elements in a structure.
Kernel code should always use “flexible array members”[1] for these
cases. The older style of one-element or zero-length arrays should
no longer be used[2].

This code was transformed with the help of Coccinelle:
(linux-5.19-rc2$ spatch --jobs $(getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN) --sp-file script.cocci --include-headers --dir . > output.patch)

@@
identifier S, member, array;
type T1, T2;
@@

struct S {
...
T1 member;
T2 array[
- 0
];
};

-fstrict-flex-arrays=3 is coming and we need to land these changes
to prevent issues like these in the short future:

../fs/minix/dir.c:337:3: warning: 'strcpy' will always overflow; destination buffer has size 0,
but the source string has length 2 (including NUL byte) [-Wfortify-source]
strcpy(de3->name, ".");
^

Since these are all [0] to [] changes, the risk to UAPI is nearly zero. If
this breaks anything, we can use a union with a new member name.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_array_member
[2] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.16/process/deprecated.html#zero-length-and-one-element-arrays

Link: https://github.com/KSPP/linux/issues/78
Build-tested-by: kernel test robot <lkp@intel.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/62b675ec.wKX6AOZ6cbE71vtF%25lkp@intel.com/
Acked-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com> # For ndctl.h
Signed-off-by: Gustavo A. R. Silva <gustavoars@kernel.org>


# 4d97f7d5 31-May-2018 Henry Wilson <henry.wilson@acentic.com>

inotify: Add flag IN_MASK_CREATE for inotify_add_watch()

The flag IN_MASK_CREATE is introduced as a flag for inotiy_add_watch()
which prevents inotify from modifying any existing watches when invoked.
If the pathname specified in the call has a watched inode associated
with it and IN_MASK_CREATE is specified, fail with an errno of EEXIST.

Use of IN_MASK_CREATE with IN_MASK_ADD is reserved for future use and
will return EINVAL.

RATIONALE

In the current implementation, there is no way to prevent
inotify_add_watch() from modifying existing watch descriptors. Even if
the caller keeps a record of all watch descriptors collected, this is
only sufficient to detect that an existing watch descriptor may have
been modified.

The assumption that a particular path will map to the same inode over
multiple calls to inotify_add_watch() cannot be made as files can be
renamed or deleted. It is also not possible to assume that two distinct
paths do no map to the same inode, due to hard-links or a dereferenced
symbolic link. Further uses of inotify_add_watch() to revert the change
may cause other watch descriptors to be modified or created, merely
compunding the problem. There is currently no system call such as
inotify_modify_watch() to explicity modify a watch descriptor, which
would be able to revert unwanted changes. Thus the caller cannot
guarantee to be able to revert any changes to existing watch decriptors.

Additionally the caller cannot assume that the events that are
associated with a watch descriptor are within the set requested, as any
future calls to inotify_add_watch() may unintentionally modify a watch
descriptor's mask. Thus it cannot currently be guaranteed that a watch
descriptor will only generate events which have been requested. The
program must filter events which come through its watch descriptor to
within its expected range.

Reviewed-by: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Henry Wilson <henry.wilson@acentic.com>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>


# e1603b6e 09-Feb-2018 Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@virtuozzo.com>

inotify: Extend ioctl to allow to request id of new watch descriptor

Watch descriptor is id of the watch created by inotify_add_watch().
It is allocated in inotify_add_to_idr(), and takes the numbers
starting from 1. Every new inotify watch obtains next available
number (usually, old + 1), as served by idr_alloc_cyclic().

CRIU (Checkpoint/Restore In Userspace) project supports inotify
files, and restores watched descriptors with the same numbers,
they had before dump. Since there was no kernel support, we
had to use cycle to add a watch with specific descriptor id:

while (1) {
int wd;

wd = inotify_add_watch(inotify_fd, path, mask);
if (wd < 0) {
break;
} else if (wd == desired_wd_id) {
ret = 0;
break;
}

inotify_rm_watch(inotify_fd, wd);
}

(You may find the actual code at the below link:
https://github.com/checkpoint-restore/criu/blob/v3.7/criu/fsnotify.c#L577)

The cycle is suboptiomal and very expensive, but since there is no better
kernel support, it was the only way to restore that. Happily, we had met
mostly descriptors with small id, and this approach had worked somehow.

But recent time containers with inotify with big watch descriptors
begun to come, and this way stopped to work at all. When descriptor id
is something about 0x34d71d6, the restoring process spins in busy loop
for a long time, and the restore hungs and delay of migration from node
to node could easily be watched.

This patch aims to solve this problem. It introduces new ioctl
INOTIFY_IOC_SETNEXTWD, which allows to request the number of next created
watch descriptor from userspace. It simply calls idr_set_cursor() primitive
to populate idr::idr_next, so that next idr_alloc_cyclic() allocation
will return this id, if it is not occupied. This is the way which is
used to restore some other resources from userspace. For example,
/proc/sys/kernel/ns_last_pid works the same for task pids.

The new code is under CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE #define, so small system
may exclude it.

v2: Use INT_MAX instead of custom definition of max id,
as IDR subsystem guarantees id is between 0 and INT_MAX.

CC: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Matthew Wilcox <willy@infradead.org>
CC: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
CC: Amir Goldstein <amir73il@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@virtuozzo.com>
Reviewed-by: Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@openvz.org>
Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox <mawilcox@microsoft.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>


# 6f52b16c 01-Nov-2017 Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

License cleanup: add SPDX license identifier to uapi header files with no license

Many user space API headers are missing licensing information, which
makes it hard for compliance tools to determine the correct license.

By default are files without license information under the default
license of the kernel, which is GPLV2. Marking them GPLV2 would exclude
them from being included in non GPLV2 code, which is obviously not
intended. The user space API headers fall under the syscall exception
which is in the kernels COPYING file:

NOTE! This copyright does *not* cover user programs that use kernel
services by normal system calls - this is merely considered normal use
of the kernel, and does *not* fall under the heading of "derived work".

otherwise syscall usage would not be possible.

Update the files which contain no license information with an SPDX
license identifier. The chosen identifier is 'GPL-2.0 WITH
Linux-syscall-note' which is the officially assigned identifier for the
Linux syscall exception. SPDX license identifiers are a legally binding
shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text.

This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and
Philippe Ombredanne. See the previous patch in this series for the
methodology of how this patch was researched.

Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart <kstewart@linuxfoundation.org>
Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne <pombredanne@nexb.com>
Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>


# 607ca46e 13-Oct-2012 David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>

UAPI: (Scripted) Disintegrate include/linux

Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>