fe67f4dd8d
It turns out that the SIGIO/FASYNC situation is almost exactly the same as the EPOLLET case was: user space really wants to be notified after every operation. Now, in a perfect world it should be sufficient to only notify user space on "state transitions" when the IO state changes (ie when a pipe goes from unreadable to readable, or from unwritable to writable). User space should then do as much as possible - fully emptying the buffer or what not - and we'll notify it again the next time the state changes. But as with EPOLLET, we have at least one case (stress-ng) where the kernel sent SIGIO due to the pipe being marked for asynchronous notification, but the user space signal handler then didn't actually necessarily read it all before returning (it read more than what was written, but since there could be multiple writes, it could leave data pending). The user space code then expected to get another SIGIO for subsequent writes - even though the pipe had been readable the whole time - and would only then read more. This is arguably a user space bug - and Colin King already fixed the stress-ng code in question - but the kernel regression rules are clear: it doesn't matter if kernel people think that user space did something silly and wrong. What matters is that it used to work. So if user space depends on specific historical kernel behavior, it's a regression when that behavior changes. It's on us: we were silly to have that non-optimal historical behavior, and our old kernel behavior was what user space was tested against. Because of how the FASYNC notification was tied to wakeup behavior, this was first broken by commits |
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| Documentation | ||
| LICENSES | ||
| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| drivers | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .clang-format | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
README
Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.