[RFC PATCH 0/5] locks: implement "filp-private" (aka UNPOSIX) locks

[Frank Filz]

> http://www.samba.org/samba/news/articles/low_point/tale_two_stds_os2
> > > .html
> > >
> > > See the section entitled "First Implementation Past the Post".
> >
> > Interesting that Jeremy actually suggested the implementation should
> > have had an arbitrary lock owner as part of the flock structure:
> >
> > "This is an example of a POSIX interface not being future-proofed
> > against modern techniques such as threading. A simple amendment to the
> > original primitive allowing a user-defined "locking context" (like a
> > process id) to be entered in the struct flock structure used to define
> > the lock would have fixed this problem, along with extra flags
> > allowing the number of locks per context to be recorded if needed."
> >
> > But I'm happy with the lock context per kernel struct file as a
> > solution, especially since that will allow locks to be sensibly passed
> > to a forked process.
> >
> > Another next step would be an asynchronous blocking lock...
> 
> Yes, please :-)

What model would be useful to you (and for what project)? One thing I could
think of is since we have a file descriptor for each lock owner/file pair,
we could do something like select on those descriptors, got to think about
how that would actually work though... The vfs lock layer does inherently
support a kernel call back when a blocked lock can be unblocked, so we just
need to figure out the best way to hook that up to user space in a way that
doesn't require a thread per blocked lock.

Frank