Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
reword the paragraph on file description ownership
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
  • Loading branch information
RalfJung committed Aug 14, 2023
1 parent 03c28d5 commit 85e6e82
Showing 1 changed file with 10 additions and 9 deletions.
19 changes: 10 additions & 9 deletions library/std/src/io/mod.rs
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -263,15 +263,16 @@
//! allocator or a memory mapping library) and now accessing the file descriptor will interfere in
//! arbitrarily destructive ways with that other library.
//!
//! Note that this does not talk about performing other operations on the file descriptor, such as
//! reading or writing. For example, on Unix, the [`OwnedFd`] and [`BorrowedFd`] types from the
//! standard library do *not* exclude that there is other code that reads or writes the same
//! underlying object, and indeed there exist safe functions like `BorrowedFd::try_clone_to_owned`
//! that can be used to read or write an object even after the end of the borrow. However, user code
//! might want to rely on keeping the object behind a file descriptor completely private and
//! protected against reads or writes from other parts of the program. Whether that is sound is
//! [currently unclear](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/114167). Certainly, `OwnedFd` as a
//! type does not provide any promise that the underlying file descriptor has not been cloned.
//! Note that exclusive ownership of a file descriptor does *not* imply exclusive ownership of the
//! underlying kernel object that the file descriptor references (also called "file description" on
//! some operating systems). An owned file descriptor can have duplicates, i.e., other file
//! descriptors that share the same kernel object. The exact rules around ownership of kernel
//! objects are [still unclear](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/114167). Until that is
//! clarified, the general advice is not to perform *any* operations on file descriptors that were
//! never borrowed to or owned by you. In other words, receiving a borrowed file descriptor *does*
//! give you the right to make a duplicate and use that duplicate beyond the end of the borrow, but
//! nothing gives you the right to just `write` to a file descriptor that never even got borrowed to
//! you.
//!
//! [`File`]: crate::fs::File
//! [`TcpStream`]: crate::net::TcpStream
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 85e6e82

Please sign in to comment.