Re: kmsg: lseek errors confuse glibc's dprintf

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Jan 23 2015 - 18:09:47 EST


On Thu, 15 Jan 2015 17:31:32 +0000 Mike Crowe <mac@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> glibc's dprintf implementation does not work correctly with /dev/kmsg file
> descriptors because glibc treats receiving EBADF and EINVAL from lseek when
> trying to determine the current file position as errors. See
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17830
>
> >From what I can tell prior to Kay Sievers printk record commit
> e11fea92e13fb91c50bacca799a6131c81929986, calling lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_CUR)
> with such a file descriptor would not return an error.
>
> Prior to Kay's change, Arnd Bergmann's commit
> 6038f373a3dc1f1c26496e60b6c40b164716f07e seemed to go to some lengths to
> preserve the successful return code rather than returning (the perhaps more
> logical) -ESPIPE.
>
> glibc is happy with either a successful return or -ESPIPE.
>
> For maximum compatibility it seems that success should be returned but
> given Kay's new seek interface perhaps this isn't helpful.
>
> This patch ensures that such a seek succeeds:
>
> diff --git a/kernel/printk/printk.c b/kernel/printk/printk.c
> index 02d6b6d..b3ff6f0 100644
> --- a/kernel/printk/printk.c
> +++ b/kernel/printk/printk.c
> @@ -693,7 +693,7 @@ static loff_t devkmsg_llseek(struct file *file, loff_t offset, int whence)
> loff_t ret = 0;
>
> if (!user)
> - return -EBADF;
> + return (whence == SEEK_CUR) ? 0 : -EBADF;

What's actually going on here? What is the significance of
file->private_data==NULL and why does this code treat it as an error?

> if (offset)
> return -ESPIPE;
>
> @@ -718,6 +718,11 @@ static loff_t devkmsg_llseek(struct file *file, loff_t offset, int whence)
> user->idx = log_next_idx;
> user->seq = log_next_seq;
> break;
> + case SEEK_CUR:
> + /* For compatibility with userspace requesting the
> + * current file position. */
> + ret = 0;
> + break;

Can we actually do something useful here? Return some value which can
be fed back into SEEK_SET to restore the file position?

> default:
> ret = -EINVAL;
> }

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