The current implementation of splice() and tee() ignores O_NONBLOCK set
on pipe file descriptors and checks only the SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK flag for
blocking on pipe arguments. This is inconsistent since splice()-ing
from/to non-pipe file descriptors does take O_NONBLOCK into
consideration.
Fix this by promoting O_NONBLOCK, when set on a pipe, to
SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK.
Some context for how the current implementation of splice() leads to
inconsistent behavior. In the ongoing work[1] to add VM tracing
capability to trace-cmd we stream tracing data over named FIFOs or
vsockets from guests back to the host.
When we receive SIGINT from user to stop tracing, we set O_NONBLOCK on
the input file descriptor and set SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK for the next call to
splice(). If splice() was blocked waiting on data from the input FIFO,
after SIGINT splice() restarts with the same arguments (no
SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK) and blocks again instead of returning -EAGAIN when no
data is available.
This differs from the splice() behavior when reading from a vsocket or
when we're doing a traditional read()/write() loop (trace-cmd's
--nosplice argument).
With this patch applied we get the same behavior in all situations after
setting O_NONBLOCK which also matches the behavior of doing a
read()/write() loop instead of splice().
This change does have potential of breaking users who don't expect
EAGAIN from splice() when SPLICE_F_NONBLOCK is not set. OTOH programs
that set O_NONBLOCK and don't anticipate EAGAIN are arguably buggy[2].
[1] https://github.com/skaslev/trace-cmd/tree/vsock
[2] d47e3da175/fs/read_write.c (L1425)
Signed-off-by: Slavomir Kaslev <kaslevs@vmware.com>
Reviewed-by: Steven Rostedt (VMware) <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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