[PATCH] fadvise(2) system call

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 02:25:59PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> I have been working for the last week or so on a patch to add an
> fadvise(2) system call.  It is somewhat similar to madvise(2) except
> that it operates on a file descriptor instead of a memory region.  It
> also only really makes sense for regular files and does not apply to
> other file descriptor types.

Cool.

Various other posix_* functions such as posix_spawn() and posix_openpt()
are implemented directly, not as a wrapper around s/posix_//. I think
posix_madvise() is only implemented as a wrapper because madvise()
already existed. Therefore, I don't see a reason why a function named
fadvise would be useful on its own (except if there are existing
applications that use that name).

If the advice is FADV_SEQUENTIAL, FADV_RANDOM or FADV_NOREUSE and the
file descriptor is invalid (fget() fails), the struct fadvise_info is
leaked.

The comparisons

+		    (fa->fa_start != 0 && fa->fa_start == end + 1) ||
+		    (uap->offset != 0 && fa->fa_end + 1 == uap->offset))) {

should instead be something like

+		    (end != OFF_MAX && fa->fa_start == end + 1) ||
+		    (fa->fa_end != OFF_MAX && fa->fa_end + 1 == uap->offset))) {

to avoid integer overflow.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker