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>
Ulrich Drepper