Don't allow splice() to files opened with O_APPEND

This is debatable, but while we're debating it, let's disallow the
combination of splice and an O_APPEND destination.

It's not entirely clear what the semantics of O_APPEND should be, and
POSIX apparently expects pwrite() to ignore O_APPEND, for example.  So
we could make up any semantics we want, including the old ones.

But Miklos convinced me that we should at least give it some thought,
and that accepting writes at arbitrary offsets is wrong at least for
IS_APPEND() files (which always have O_APPEND set, even if the reverse
isn't true: you can obviously have O_APPEND set on a regular file).

So disallow O_APPEND entirely for now.  I doubt anybody cares, and this
way we have one less gray area to worry about.

Reported-and-argued-for-by: Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <ens.axboe@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/fs/splice.c b/fs/splice.c
index 1bbc6f4bb09c..a1e701c27156 100644
--- a/fs/splice.c
+++ b/fs/splice.c
@@ -898,6 +898,9 @@ static long do_splice_from(struct pipe_inode_info *pipe, struct file *out,
 	if (unlikely(!(out->f_mode & FMODE_WRITE)))
 		return -EBADF;
 
+	if (unlikely(out->f_flags & O_APPEND))
+		return -EINVAL;
+
 	ret = rw_verify_area(WRITE, out, ppos, len);
 	if (unlikely(ret < 0))
 		return ret;