Re: [PATCH 01/16] devpts: Attempting to get it right

[Peter Hurley]

On 04/19/2016 05:24 PM, Peter Hurley wrote:
> On 04/19/2016 04:35 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 19, 2016 at 3:06 PM, Eric W. Biederman
>> <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>> I have work inspired by this rolled into my code.  I will post shortly
>>> after a little more testing.
>>
>> Actually, I have a slightly fixed version in my tree. I've been
>> running this on my own machines for a few days, just to verify, along
>> with some testing.
>>
>> The fixes are some cleanups of the header file (the !UNIX98 section
>> that nobody uses was bogus), and fixing "devpts_get_ref()" to get the
>> "struct file *" argument too. The current code doesn't need it, but
>> the code to actually look up the right pts/ directory from the ptmx
>> file open needs it because that's where the path is - passing in just
>> the inode isn't sufficient).
>>
>> Anyway, I think I'll just merge my branch instead of sending out
>> another emailed patch, because I don't think that patch is
>> controversial or unsafe. It doesn't actually change any semantics, and
>> only does cleanups. If it breaks something due to the rules about
>> private_data being different for slave and master side pty's, then the
>> old code was broken too - it used to always put a inode pointer in
>> there, but they were very different inode pointers.
> 
> Yes, the old code was broken. The new code always uses the ptmx inode.

In re-reading, I was not as clear as I should have been here.
Yes, the different inodes are stored in their corresponding driver_data
but the ptmx inode is always used for final teardown.


> Which is a stopgap measure to prevent the devpts instance from
> teardown when the only open filp is /dev/tty.
> 
> What I want to do instead (but not for -stable) is bump the inode
> reference at controlling tty association instead (either first
> qualifying open or ioctl(TIOCSCTTY)). That way it would always be
> the slave inode. This method is non-trivial though because it makes
> disassociation more complicated.
> 
> Regards,
> Peter Hurley
>