Re: Upcoming: Notifications, FS notifications and fsinfo()

[J. Bruce Fields]

On Fri, Apr 03, 2020 at 05:12:23PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote:
> BTW, while we are at it: one more thing I'd love to see exposed by
> statx() is a simple flag whether the inode is a mount point. There's
> plenty code that implements a test like this all over the place, and
> it usually isn't very safe. There's one implementation in util-linux
> for example (in the /usr/bin/mountpoint binary), and another one in
> systemd. Would be awesome to just have a statx() return flag for that,
> that would make things *so* much easier and more robust. because in
> fact most code isn't very good that implements this, as much of it
> just compares st_dev of the specified file and its parent. Better code
> compares the mount ID, but as mentioned that's not as pretty as it
> could be so far...

nfs-utils/support/misc/mountpoint.c:check_is_mountpoint() stats the file
and ".." and returns true if they have different st_dev or the same
st_ino.  Comparing mount ids sounds better.

So anyway, yes, everybody reinvents the wheel here, and this would be
useful.  (And, yes, we want to know for the vfsmount, we don't care
whether the same inode is used as a mountpoint someplace else.)

--b.