Subject: Re: Addition to force open to open only regular files
To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
From: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@zembu.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 11/28/2000 16:01:45
On Tue, 28 Nov 2000, Warner Losh wrote:

> : And finally, why not make fhopen() respect the permissions on the given
> : file?
> : 
> : I.e. why are these calls restricted to the super-user?  They'd be great
> : for providing against race conditions which might occur in the mortal
> : realm...
> 
> The talk on the FreeBSD side of the world is that these calls should
> quietly die a quick and sudden death.  They are fore the nfs server
> only and there are practicle problems with their use.  The problems
> aren't easily solved.  I'm not sure of all the details, but I thought
> I'd let the NetBSD community know what some in the FreeBSD community
> are thinknig.

getfh() is for an nfs server, but fhopen(), fhstat(), and fhstatfs() are
not. They were designed as part of the NAStore system, a system for doing
data migration. Also, they were adopted by arla to replace arla-specific
system calls which did the same thing.

What practical problems are there with their use?

Take care,

Bill