• Slavomir Kaslev's avatar
    fs: Make splice() and tee() take into account O_NONBLOCK flag on pipes · ee5e0011
    Slavomir Kaslev authored
    The current implementation of splice() and tee() ignores O_NONBLOCK set
    on pipe file descriptors and checks only the SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK flag for
    blocking on pipe arguments.  This is inconsistent since splice()-ing
    from/to non-pipe file descriptors does take O_NONBLOCK into
    consideration.
    
    Fix this by promoting O_NONBLOCK, when set on a pipe, to
    SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK.
    
    Some context for how the current implementation of splice() leads to
    inconsistent behavior.  In the ongoing work[1] to add VM tracing
    capability to trace-cmd we stream tracing data over named FIFOs or
    vsockets from guests back to the host.
    
    When we receive SIGINT from user to stop tracing, we set O_NONBLOCK on
    the input file descriptor and set SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK for the next call to
    splice().  If splice() was blocked waiting on data from the input FIFO,
    after SIGINT splice() restarts with the same arguments (no
    SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK) and blocks again instead of returning -EAGAIN when no
    data is available.
    
    This differs from the splice() behavior when reading from a vsocket or
    when we're doing a traditional read()/write() loop (trace-cmd's
    --nosplice argument).
    
    With this patch applied we get the same behavior in all situations after
    setting O_NONBLOCK which also matches the behavior of doing a
    read()/write() loop instead of splice().
    
    This change does have potential of breaking users who don't expect
    EAGAIN from splice() when SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK is not set.  OTOH programs
    that set O_NONBLOCK and don't anticipate EAGAIN are arguably buggy[2].
    
     [1] https://github.com/skaslev/trace-cmd/tree/vsock
     [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d47e3da1759230e394096fd742aad423c291ba48/fs/read_write.c#L1425Signed-off-by: default avatarSlavomir Kaslev <kaslevs@vmware.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarSteven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    ee5e0011
splice.c 40 KB