Re: Testing if two open descriptors refer to the same inode

[Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>]

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On 2024-07-29, Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> wrote:
> It was pointed out to me that inode numbers on Linux are no longer
> expected to be unique per file system, even for local file systems.
> Applications sometimes need to check if two (open) files are the same.
> For example, a program may want to use a temporary file if is invoked
> with input and output files referring to the same file.

Based on the discussions we had at LSF/MM, I believe the "correct" way
now is to do

  name_to_handle_at(fd, "", ..., AT_EMPTY_PATH|AT_HANDLE_FID)

and then use the fhandle as the key to compare inodes. AT_HANDLE_FID is
needed for filesystems that don't support decoding file handles, and was
added in Linux 6.6[1]. However, I think this inode issue is only
relevant for btree filesystems, and I think both btrfs and bcachefs both
support decoding fhandles so this should work on fairly old kernels
without issue (though I haven't checked).

Lennart suggested there should be a way to get this information from
statx(2) so that you can get this new inode identifier without doing a
bunch of extra syscalls to verify that inode didn't change between the
two syscalls. I have a patchset for this, but I suspect it's too ugly
(we can't return the full file handle so we need to hash it). I'll send
an RFC later this week or next.

[1]: commit 96b2b072ee62 ("exportfs: allow exporting non-decodeable file handles to userspace")

> How can we check for this?  The POSIX way is to compare st_ino and
> st_dev in stat output, but if inode numbers are not unique, that will
> result in files falsely being reported as identical.  It's harmless in
> the temporary file case, but it in other scenarios, it may result in
> data loss.

(Another problem is that st_dev can be different for the same mount due
to subvolumes.)

-- 
Aleksa Sarai
Senior Software Engineer (Containers)
SUSE Linux GmbH
<https://www.cyphar.com/>

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