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SubjectRe: [PATCH] Don't set sempid in semctl syscall.
On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:42 AM, PrasannaKumar Muralidharan
<prasannatsmkumar@gmail.com> wrote:
> Agreed. Is it better to change the man page and document the behaviour?

Requoting text I just added to the Bugzilla report to explain why the
right approach seems to be to document, rather than change this
behavior:

So, given that there is implementation variation that probably
predates POSIX.1 (I'm assuming that the OpenSolaris behavior has an
ancestry that stretches way back), I'd argue that the fault here lies
with POSIX, inasmuch as it failed to capture the full variation in
existing implementation behavior. (The BSD implementations of System V
IPC were post facto.) Generally POSIX.1 does not try to prescribe away
existing implementation behavior, but instead creates a loose spec,
not that an implementation "may do such and such".

I've added the following text to the semctl(2) man page:

The sempid value
POSIX.1 defines sempid as the "process ID of [the] last opera‐
tion" on a semaphore, and explicitly notes that this value is
set by a successful semop(2) call, with the implication that no
other interface affects the sempid value.

While some implementations conform to the behavior specified in
POSIX.1, others do not. (The fault here probably lies with
POSIX.1 inasmuch as it likely failed to capture the full range
of existing implementation behaviors.) Various other implemen‐
tations also update sempid for the other operations that update
the value of a semaphore: the SETVAL and SETALL operations, as
well as the semaphore adjustments performed on process termina‐
tion as a consequence of the use of the SEM_UNDO flag (see
semop(2)).

Linux also updates sempid for SETVAL operations and semaphore
adjustments. However, somewhat inconsistently, it does not
update sempid for SETALL operations. While the SETALL behavior
might be viewed as a bug, the behavior is longstanding, and is
probably unlikely to change.

Cheers,

Michael

--
Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer;
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Author of "The Linux Programming Interface", http://blog.man7.org/

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