Bill Rees <bill_rees@firepower.com> writes:

> This seems awfully heavy handed for resolving something that needs to be
> fixed in the kernel in the first place.  Aside from a server side inode
> depletion problem, the access times on tmp would soar as users collided
> during path lookup.

Why should file creation race conditions be handled in the kernel?

I also don't see how inodes can be depelted -- you would only have one 
more than normal per user, and two more for the system's use.

> What exactly are the race conditions that are problematic?

There are quite a few...  Mostly ones where a process is braindead and
copies /etc/master.passwd to /tmp/ptmp.12345, edits it, and then removes
it.  The problem is that some programs (as FreeBSD found out recently I
think) don't do this sanely.

There are other less severe ones too -- elm races, etc.

--Michael