O_TMPFILE has a few minor problems that I have been thinking about for a
while. I just recently got reminded about this and remembered that most
problems get resolved by using memfd_create.
- O_TMPFILE is only supported on some filesystems.
- Supported filesystem must be the one mounted to the pathname being
opened.
- Only a minor inconvenience as tmpfs and all related filesystems
support this.
- An inode is actually created on whatever filesystem is backing the
folder.
- `/tmp/` must exist as a directory
- If this folder happened to not be mounted then these temporary
files wouldn't have been created.
- memfd_create doesn't have a folder that needs to exist.
- We were leaving the files open as read/write
- While we were rewinding the file offset, an misbehaving application
could have wrote garbage to the temp file.
- memfd sealing allows us to open the FD as RW and then seal its
capabilities, making it a read-only FD.
- We were leaking FDs opened with O_CLOEXEC
- We could have just opened the O_TMPFILE with O_CLOEXEC
- memfd also just supports this flag, so use it.
- No real issues, just nice to be sanitary here.
Overall this doesn't really change any behaviour, but it is nice to
cleanup some of the edges there.
Ryan Houdek