A new file_operations method

The file_operations structure contains pointers to functions which implement I/O operations on files and char devices. These operations include the usual suspects, such as "open", "read", "write", "llseek", etc., along with some more esoteric ones ("sendfile", "get_unmapped_area"). The file_operations structure tends not to change very often; changes here can force updating a great many filesystems and drivers.

The NFS maintainers recently ran into a problem: it is not possible to simultaneously implement the O_DIRECT and O_APPEND modes over NFS. Rather than silently fail to implement a request to do so, the NFS developers have submitted a patch which adds an fcntl() method to the file_operations structure. Its prototype is:

    long (*fcntl)(unsigned int fd, unsigned int cmd, 
                  unsigned long arg, struct file *filp);

The fd, cmd, and arg parameters come straight from user space. A file descriptor is an unusual argument for a file_operations method, but the generic fcntl() code needs it. filp is, as usual, a pointer to the file structure for the open file.

If a module does not provide a fcntl() method, the call is handled in the usual way. Otherwise, the new fcntl() function should provide a complete implementation of that system call. Typically, the method will perform whatever device- or filesystem-specific work is needed (NFS simply checks for the O_DIRECT|O_APPEND combination and returns a failure code if it's there), then pass all four arguments to generic_file_fcnt(), which is exported to modules.

This patch is currently in the -mm tree; it will likely find its way into the mainline sometime after 2.6.5 comes out.

Index entries for this article
Kernel	struct file_operations

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A new file_operations method

Posted Mar 25, 2004 18:00 UTC (Thu) by stevef (guest, #7712) [Link]

This will be helpful to other network filesystems as well, and will allow the
cifs vfs to handle F_NOTIFY (directory change notification) and probably
leases (file open notification) and send them to Samba and Windows
servers (without this patch many fcntl operations can only be meaningful
for local filesystems).

A new file_operations method

Posted Mar 25, 2004 20:22 UTC (Thu) by chloe_zen (guest, #8258) [Link] (1 responses)

So the open() case was already covered, I guess...(?)

open() is covered

Posted Mar 26, 2004 22:51 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

There has always been a VFS call for open(); a filesystem driver could always fail an open() if it didn't like the open flags.

Until now, the filesystem driver was not involved in the general case of fcntl(); there was no way a filesystem driver could cause an fcntl() that changes open flags to fail.