Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 03:42:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Richard Gooch <rgooch@ras.ucalgary.ca>
Subject: [RFC] DEVFS_NOTIFY_ASYNC_OPEN removal
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.21.0211240310120.9014-100000@steklov.math.psu.edu>
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	Hmm...  There's a very odd devfs feature that
	(a) is unused by anybody, AFAICS
	(b) is unusable as it is
	(c) is poorly documented
	(d) adds rather odd code

The feature in question is:
	* when /dev/vc/<n> is opened the first time, event is sent to
devfsd.  Said event might be delivered at any point afterwards - open()
doesn't wait for anything.  Event bears (euid,egid) of the opener, which
is pretty much guaranteed to be (0, <whatever>).  In any case, by the
time when devfsd receives the event, device might be already closed and
opened by another process - without any events sent.
	* when memory pressure finally flushes dentry of /dev/vc/<n>
devfsd gets another event and everything returns to original state.
That event also bears (euid,egid) of task in question, which can be
anything and has no relation whatsoever to task(s) that had ever done
something with /dev/vc
	* as said above, any open/close on /dev/vc/<n> between the first
one and the moment when dentry gets flushed (which can happen after
unpredictable delay - e.g. at the umount time) doesn't generate any events.

	Surprise, surprise, that feature is impossible to use in any
meaningful way.  As far as I can see, nobody actually uses it.

	I have no idea what kind of use _was_ intended - why would anyone
want to notify userland about some attempts to open virtual consoles with
random delay after the event in question...  Hell knows.  It definitely
can't be used for any "let's grant them extra permissions" scheme, due to
asynchronous nature of that animal (and 1001 other reasons).

	In any case, it's unusable and unused.  As for the poor documentation,
just take a look at devfsd(8) and see what it says about the events in
question:
<quote>
       ASYNC_OPEN
              The inode was opened (the opening process does not  wait  for  a
              response).

       CLOSE  The file was closed.
</quote>
Note that both are generated only on /dev/vc/* and even on these not every
open/close gives aforementioned events (see above for details).

	Semantics above had been there since before the merge into the tree.
Do we really want to keep that junk?

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