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authorShea Levy <shea@shealevy.com>2013-03-08T03·53-0500
committerEelco Dolstra <eelco.dolstra@logicblox.com>2013-03-25T18·00+0100
commitcc63db1dd5c37aead3e3d2e20e2d2f548cc24830 (patch)
tree6f4d75a127dc69806b3c35fc086aafc74ee2bd6c /src/boost
parent2c9cf5074642459b37f19a2d4c6bc0233248d3a4 (diff)
makeStoreWritable: Ask forgiveness, not permission
It is surprisingly impossible to check if a mountpoint is a bind mount
on Linux, and in my previous commit I forgot to check if /nix/store was
even a mountpoint at all. statvfs.f_flag is not populated with MS_BIND
(and even if it were, my check was wrong in the previous commit).

Luckily, the semantics of mount with MS_REMOUNT | MS_BIND make both
checks unnecessary: if /nix/store is not a mountpoint, then mount will
fail with EINVAL, and if /nix/store is not a bind-mount, then it will
not be made writable. Thus, if /nix/store is not a mountpoint, we fail
immediately (since we don't know how to make it writable), and if
/nix/store IS a mountpoint but not a bind-mount, we fail at first write
(see below for why we can't check and fail immediately).

Note that, due to what is IMO buggy behavior in Linux, calling mount
with MS_REMOUNT | MS_BIND on a non-bind readonly mount makes the
mountpoint appear writable in two places: In the sixth (but not the
10th!) column of mountinfo, and in the f_flags member of struct statfs.
All other syscalls behave as if the mount point were still readonly (at
least for Linux 3.9-rc1, but I don't think this has changed recently or
is expected to soon). My preferred semantics would be for MS_REMOUNT |
MS_BIND to fail on a non-bind mount, as it doesn't make sense to remount
a non bind-mount as a bind mount.
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