Re: closefd: closes a file of any process

[Werner Almesberger]

Tigran Aivazian wrote:
> I don't actually propose to "just break their file descriptors". If I have
> a process that is actively doing io on a file I want to atomically switch
> to a different (dentry, inode) pair whilst releasing the old ones. 

Hmm, a generalized transfer mechanism could be useful for programs
writing huge log files or such, if you catch them in time to let them
continue on a file system with more space (assuming they never ever
seek). Likewise, you could "move" applications from terminal to terminal
without using screen(1). Interesting, but probably quite non-trivial in
the general sense.

Your original proposal, moving to nullfs, gives you simply the possibility
to have a "hard" or a "soft" failure. The basic assumption is still that
the program didn't really need to access the file in the first place.

So I'm still wondering if a clean exit/kill wouldn't be better in almost
all cases.

- Werner

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 / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH       [e-mail] /
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