Re: Why does close_stdout close stdout and stderr?

[Florian Weimer]

* Eric Blake:

> On 4/29/19 2:45 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> I get that error checking is important.  But why not just use ferror and
>> fflush?  Closing the streams is excessive and tends to introduce
>> use-after-free issues, as evidenced by the sanitizer workarounds.
>
> If I recall the explanation, at least some versions of NFS do not
> actually flush on fflush(), but wait until close(). If you want to avoid
> data loss and ensure that things written made it to the remote storage
> while detecting every possible indication when an error may have
> prevented that from working, then you have to go all the way through
> close().

Any file system on Linux does this to a varying degree (unlike Solaris
and Windows, I think).  If you want to catch low-level I/O errors, you
need to call fsync after fflush.  And I doubt this is something we want
to do because it will result in bad-looking performance.

But the NFS aspect is somewhat plausible at least.

I can try to figure out if NFS makes a difference for Linux here,
i.e. if there are cases where a write will succeed, but only an
immediately following close will report an error condition that is
known, in principle, even at the time of the write.  A difference
between hard and soft NFS mounts could matter in this context.

Thanks,
Florian