[PATCH] vfs: *at functions: core

Here is a series of patches which introduce in total 13 new system calls
which take a file descriptor/filename pair instead of a single file
name.  These functions, openat etc, have been discussed on numerous
occasions.  They are needed to implement race-free filesystem traversal,
they are necessary to implement a virtual per-thread current working
directory (think multi-threaded backup software), etc.

We have in glibc today implementations of the interfaces which use the
/proc/self/fd magic.  But this code is rather expensive.  Here are some
results (similar to what Jim Meyering posted before).

The test creates a deep directory hierarchy on a tmpfs filesystem.  Then
rm -fr is used to remove all directories.  Without syscall support I get
this:

real    0m31.921s
user    0m0.688s
sys     0m31.234s

With syscall support the results are much better:

real    0m20.699s
user    0m0.536s
sys     0m20.149s

The interfaces are for obvious reasons currently not much used.  But they'll
be used.  coreutils (and Jeff's posixutils) are already using them.
Furthermore, code like ftw/fts in libc (maybe even glob) will also start using
them.  I expect a patch to make follow soon.  Every program which is walking
the filesystem tree will benefit.

Signed-off-by: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk-manpages@gmx.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/time.h b/include/linux/time.h
index f2aca7ec6325..614dd8465839 100644
--- a/include/linux/time.h
+++ b/include/linux/time.h
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@ extern void do_gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv);
 extern int do_settimeofday(struct timespec *tv);
 extern int do_sys_settimeofday(struct timespec *tv, struct timezone *tz);
 #define do_posix_clock_monotonic_gettime(ts) ktime_get_ts(ts)
-extern long do_utimes(char __user *filename, struct timeval *times);
+extern long do_utimes(int dfd, char __user *filename, struct timeval *times);
 struct itimerval;
 extern int do_setitimer(int which, struct itimerval *value,
                         struct itimerval *ovalue);