Post #1887734

2026-04-24 11:56 UTC

@swick great post! The sad part is that even after all those years chaseat() in systemd still gets relevant changes every few months, that non-trivially rearrange my PoV on file system interfacing. I.e. right now we are working on reinventing chaseat() around a new InodeRef structure that combines and fd *and* a path into one (together with some other fields) so that we don't lose the ability to write useful log messages (you really want a path for that) but can do the actual ops via fds...

Replies (2)

@pid_eins@mastodon.social 2026-04-24 12:01

@swick it's amazing how broken and unsecure posix fs apis have been from day one and still are (i.e. there is no posix way to convert an O_PATH fd to a real one for regular files for example)... And really sad that even modern programming language standard libraries always focus on the posix fs api, mostly ignoring the new stuff, -- rather than focussing on the newer stuff and then trying to retrofit the old stuff to work like the new stuff wherever possible.

Open ##1887735
@swick@hachyderm.io 2026-04-24 23:42

@pid_eins FWIW, I have a change for glnx_chase which adds a strategic callback for every path segment that gets resolved, so we can, for example, build the path without adding more complexity to glnx_chase itself. I also hinted at a new cross-platform API in GLib/Gio where we would want to have an opaque handle, which for posix would contain the fd, but it could also contain the path as well. So yeah, I agree that it's the right design, but I think it's something we should do on top of glnx_chase.

Open ##1887745