> Has anyone ever sat down and clearly worked out the desired semantics
> for TRYEMULROOT? I've noted inconsistencies in the past, and because
> in a number of ways it's a special case of onionfs I'm somewhat
> concerned that there may be cases where the proper or desired behavior
> is unclear or ambiguous.
>
> Right now most path lookups set TRYEMULROOT. This is fine for ordinary
> cases (e.g. stat) -- if the object is present under the emulation
> root, it's found and returned; if not, the real root is tried instead.
> However, for operations that look up a parent directory and then
> operate on it (e.g. mkdir) it becomes less clear: one approach is to
> go strictly by whether the parent dir exists in the emulation root; if
> it does, the operation is performed on that dir and if it doesn't work
> there it fails. Another approach is to allow some or all errors in the
> directory operation to cause retrying with the real root, that is,
> getting a new parent dir using the real root and then retrying the
> operation on it. A third alternative is to always look up both parent
> dirs and use them or their contents to deduce the right action to
> take, which might be different for different operations.
>
> I think it's safe to consider only two such operations: the create
> operations are all basically the same as mkdir, and the remove
> operations are all basically the same as rmdir. (Rename is one of each
> rolled together.)
>
> I think I favor the first alternative, which is to get a parent dir
> and only ever retry that. Not only is it (much) simpler, but it gives
> a clear and systematic behavior in all cases.
>
> Otherwise you end up with possibly weird situations like mkdir("/a/b")
> when /emul/foo/a exists, /emul/foo/a/b does not, and /a/b does; or
> rmdir("/a/b") when both /emul/foo/a/b and /a/b exist. Or mkdir("/a/b")
> when /emul/foo/a and /a both exist but /emul/foo is mounted read-only,
> or NFS mounted with rootsquash or whatever else. Experience with
> onionfs suggests that there's a nearly unlimited supply of such
> possibilities and failure to account for them all in advance leads to
> a nearly unlimited supply of crashing bugs.
>
> The behavior we currently have is not quite the same as this; it
> retries on all errors that occur underneath a particular point in the
> namei/lookup spaghetti, regardless of what the error is or what
> operation is in progress. If I'm reading the code correctly, for
> example, if you do mkdir("/a/b/c") and /emul/foo/a/b is a symbolic
> link that contains a component longer than NAME_MAX, it'll retry and
> possibly create /a/b/c. But if /emul/foo/a/b is a symbolic link that
> points to itself, you'll get ELOOP and it'll never look in the real
> root. This doesn't really make much sense.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Does anyone know of specific cases that have to be handled in a
> particular way (e.g. to make applications happy), such that searching
> only for the parent directory to operate in won't work?
>
> --
> David A. Holland
>
dholland@netbsd.org
