On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 05:41:41PM -0500, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
> > What if we have an ioctl or a process personality flag where a broken
> > application can tell the file system "I'm broken, please give me a
> > degraded telldir/seekdir cookie"? That way we don't penalize programs
> > that are doing the right thing, while providing some accomodation for
> > programs who are abusing the telldir cookie.
>
> Yeah, if there's a simple way to do that, maybe it would be worth it.
Doing this as an ioctl which gets called right after opendir, i.e
(ignoring error checking):
DIR *dir = opendir("/foo/bar/baz");
ioctl(dirfd(dir), EXT4_IOC_DEGRADED_READDIR, 1);
...
should be quite easy. It would be a very ext3/4 specific thing,
though.
It would be more work to get something in as a process personality
flag, mostly due to the politics of assiging a bit out of the
bitfield.
- Ted