[TUHS] Etymology of the open file table?

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 10:23 PM, Marc Rochkind <rochkind at basepath.com>
wrote:

> A ref-counted data structure organized how, for what language? Integers
> are really easy to work with.
>
> (Perhaps I misunderstood your post.)
>

Sorry, let me try and clarify.

As I understand things: At the process level there exists an array of
pointers to file structures indexed by file descriptor; a file descriptor
is thus in some senses a per-process proxy for a richer data structure.
Those file structures are collected into a single, global table. The
question is why this latter table? One could rather imagine an
implementation where open() allocates (e.g., via malloc()) a new 'struct
file' that contains as a structure field an 'int refcnt' that is
incremented when a descriptor is dup()'d or as a side-effect of a fork(),
and is decremented as a result of a close(); when 'refcnt' drops to zero,
the structure could be freed with e.g. 'mfree'. What is the benefit of
'struct file file[];'?

To give a concrete example, consider 7th Edition Unix. sys/h/file.h
contains the definition of 'struct file', which already includes 'char
f_count' which is documented as a 'reference count.' This is incremented as
the result of fork() (really, in newproc() in sys/sys/slp.c) and dup()
(sys/sys/sys3.c), or when a 'struct file' is allocated (sys/sys/fio.c).
It's decremented when a file is closed; the ref count is also used to
handle releasing inodes and so forth in closef() (sys/sys/fio.c); there's
some minor use in the pipe code. But falloc() always iterates over the
global 'file' (declared as 'extern struct file file[];' in sys/h/file.h,
defined in the generated output of the 'mkconf' command in sys/conf; e.g.
sys/conf/c.c).

The question is, why the global table named 'file'? Sure, it naturally
bounds the total number of open files; is that the primary reason? Was it
just expedient? Were there any other uses that made a global array
particularly attractive as a design approach? I suppose the same question
could be asked about the proc table, buffer structs, etc.

        - Dan C.

On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 8:07 PM, Dan Cross <crossd at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This came up today at work; what's the origin of the open file table? The
>> suggestion was made that, instead, a ref-counted data structure could be
>> allocated at open() time to serve the same purpose, and that a table of
>> open files was superfluous. My guess was that this made it (relatively)
>> easy to look up what files referred to a particular device?
>>
>
>
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