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authorLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2012-04-29 13:30:08 -0700
committerLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>2012-04-29 13:30:08 -0700
commit64f371bc3107e69efce563a3d0f0e6880de0d537 (patch)
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autofs: make the autofsv5 packet file descriptor use a packetized pipe
The autofs packet size has had a very unfortunate size problem on x86: because the alignment of 'u64' differs in 32-bit and 64-bit modes, and because the packet data was not 8-byte aligned, the size of the autofsv5 packet structure differed between 32-bit and 64-bit modes despite looking otherwise identical (300 vs 304 bytes respectively). We first fixed that up by making the 64-bit compat mode know about this problem in commit a32744d4abae ("autofs: work around unhappy compat problem on x86-64"), and that made a 32-bit 'systemd' work happily on a 64-bit kernel because everything then worked the same way as on a 32-bit kernel. But it turned out that 'automount' had actually known and worked around this problem in user space, so fixing the kernel to do the proper 32-bit compatibility handling actually *broke* 32-bit automount on a 64-bit kernel, because it knew that the packet sizes were wrong and expected those incorrect sizes. As a result, we ended up reverting that compatibility mode fix, and thus breaking systemd again, in commit fcbf94b9dedd. With both automount and systemd doing a single read() system call, and verifying that they get *exactly* the size they expect but using different sizes, it seemed that fixing one of them inevitably seemed to break the other. At one point, a patch I seriously considered applying from Michael Tokarev did a "strcmp()" to see if it was automount that was doing the operation. Ugly, ugly. However, a prettier solution exists now thanks to the packetized pipe mode. By marking the communication pipe as being packetized (by simply setting the O_DIRECT flag), we can always just write the bigger packet size, and if user-space does a smaller read, it will just get that partial end result and the extra alignment padding will simply be thrown away. This makes both automount and systemd happy, since they now get the size they asked for, and the kernel side of autofs simply no longer needs to care - it could pad out the packet arbitrarily. Of course, if there is some *other* user of autofs (please, please, please tell me it ain't so - and we haven't heard of any) that tries to read the packets with multiple writes, that other user will now be broken - the whole point of the packetized mode is that one system call gets exactly one packet, and you cannot read a packet in pieces. Tested-by: Michael Tokarev <mjt@tls.msk.ru> Cc: Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> Cc: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> Cc: Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net> Cc: Thomas Meyer <thomas@m3y3r.de> Cc: stable@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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