Re: I'm done with O_CLOEXEC

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 4:43 PM, Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca> wrote:

> The first one, which we have been pursuing during the past several
> years, is to try to mark every file descriptor that we create as
> O_CLOEXEC.  This is particularly fun in multi-threaded programs because
> it means that we have a race between the creation of a file descriptor
> and marking it O_CLOEXEC vs. a fork() that may be happening in another
> thread.  This has led to the creation of a whole bunch of new syscalls
> to allow creation of file descriptors that already have O_CLOEXEC set
> from the start, thus avoiding the race.  We have tried to use these
> syscalls where possible, but they usually are not part of POSIX.
> Somethings they are completely unavailable, even in Linux, or when they
> are available, they have other annoying limitations.

'Not part of POSIX' has never stopped us from using something in glib:
atomics, futexes, inotify, pipe2, libelf, to name just a few...