linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] Revert "kernel/printk: add kmsg SEEK

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Date:   Mon, 22 Jun 2020 09:42:25 -0700
From:   Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:     Bruno Meneguele <bmeneg@...hat.com>
Cc:     "Jason A. Donenfeld" <Jason@...c4.com>,
        Petr Mladek <pmladek@...e.com>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@...il.com>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        David Laight <David.Laight@...lab.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Revert "kernel/printk: add kmsg SEEK_CUR handling"

On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 6:38 AM Bruno Meneguele <bmeneg@...hat.com> wrote:
>
> However, the issue with glibc is their fd checking on dprintf using:
>
> lseek(offset == 0, whence == SEEK_CUR)
>
> Which, technically, isn't a relative seek operation in my opinion, thus
> I'm also not sure that returning EINVAL is correct.

Well, I'm not sure there is a "correct". Normal file descriptors are
seekable or not, this is kind of a special one. It's not like you can
read it byte for byte anyway.

There is a "historical behavior".

> Would it make sense to return the next buffer index instead? Basically
> the same as SEEK_END does? The first "if (offset)" in the function would
> prevent any real relative move while SEEK_CUR would return a valid
> address following this buffer behavior of specific points it could seek
> to.

Maybe. At the same time, the way we don't actually return a real
position means that that's very dangerous too. We'll always return
"we're at position zero".

And we never accept byte-by-byte reads and require a "get the whole
record" model.

So I think we might as well accept "kmsg is special".

I don't have hugely strong opinions on it - I certainly agree that
"SEEK_CUR with offset zero could be a no-op", but I also don't think
there's a huge reason to try to change it, considering just _how_
special kmsg is.

               Linus