Contact: Konstantin Belousov <kib@FreeBSD.org>

Unix VFS API, from a very high point of view, provides two kinds of interfaces. One is the path-based operations, typically manipulating metadata, like remove, rename, change permissions and similar. The second is the file-descriptor operations, typical are read, write, truncate, and other. The well-known open(2) syscall returns a file descriptor from the path.

The file descriptor is a reliable handle for the file targeted by operations. Whatever other action was performed on the file meanwhile, rename, even delete, file descriptor still references the same file, and any operation done on it, affects that file.

Until recently, there was no similar reliable way to take a handle on the file path, and then reliably use it for the operations of the first kind. Now, Linux introduced some facilities that make it possible, and FreeBSD tried to provide a compatible API.

First, there is a way to get the file descriptor for a path. It is created with the open(2) syscall, when the O_PATH flag is specified. The returned descriptor cannot be used for normal file operations, it only designates a place in the filesystem namespace. Attempts to e.g. read or write using it results in EBADF. But the system also does not check the access rights on the target file while opening. It is enough for the process to read the content of the directory with the file name for open(O_PATH) to succeed.

To actually use such descriptor, there is a new flag AT_EMPTY_PATH, understood by the \*at(2) set of syscalls. When supplied, and the path argument set to "" (empty path), \*at(2) syscalls operate on the file designated by the dirfd argument.

It is not too exciting for e.g. fstatat(2), where already available fstat(2) operates on any kind of file descriptor. But consider linkat(2), which in combination with AT_EMPTY_PATH now allows to re-link any opened file descriptor to a named file (this requires root privilege). Other examples of available operations are chownat(2), chmodat(2), and others; see man pages. When a file descriptor and AT_EMPTY_PATH are supplied, the program knows for sure that the corresponding operation was done on the specific file, not subject to a race when our file was renamed, and some other file replaced it, providing a different file on the same path. With O_PATH, we get the same access rules as for normal chmod, not needing to have read or write permission for the file content.

A way to translate the path descriptor to a normal file descriptor that can be read from or written to is to use openat(2) with O_EMPTY_PATH flag. The syscall checks the current access permissions and grants the requested mode by returning a normal descriptor.

In Linux, there is no equivalent of the O_EMPTY_PATH flag. It seems, instead, that its implementation of our equivalent of fdescfs opens the underlying file on open(2) of /dev/fd/N name. This behavior is incompatible with the existing FreeBSD fdescfs exposed operation, so it cannot be changed for the default mount of fdescfs on /dev/fd. A new mount flag "nodup" was added for fdescfs which emulates Linux for descriptors backed by vnodes. See the fdescfs(5) man page for details.

The described new Unix VFS API is used by Samba. Adding it to FreeBSD should allow our system to be still the first-grade platform for Samba, and was requested by Samba porters.

Sponsor: The FreeBSD Foundation