[TUHS] fstat(2) on pipes?

[norman@oclsc.org (Norman Wilson)]

I remember once, long ago--probably in the early 1980s--writing
a program that expected fstat on a pipe to return the amount of
data buffered in the pipe.  It worked on the system on which
I wrote the code.  Then I tried it on another, related but
different UNIX, and it didn't work.  So if POSIX/SUS don't
prescribe a standard, I don't think one should pretend there
is one, and (as I learned back then) it's unwise to depend
on the result, except I think it's fair not to expect fstat
to fail on any valid file descriptor.

I'm pretty sure that in 7/e and earlier, fstat on a pipe
reported a regular file with zero links.  There was a reason
for this: the kernel in fact allocated an i-node from a
designated pipe device (pipedev) file system, usually the
root.  So the excuse that `there's no i-node' was just wrong.

In last-generation Research systems, when pipes were streams
(and en passant became full duplex, which caused no trouble
at all but simplified life elsewhere--I think I was the one
who realized that meant we didn't need pseudo-ttys any more),
the system allocated a pair of in-core i-nodes when a pipe
was created.  As long as such an i-node cannot be accidentally
confused with one belonging to any disk file system, this
causes no trouble at all, and since it is possible to have
more than one disk file system this is trivially possible
just by reserving a device number.  (In fact by then our
in-core i-nodes were marked with a file system type as well,
and pipes just became their own file system.)  stat always
returned size 0 for (Research) stream pipes, partly because
nobody cared enough, partly because the implementation of
streams didn't keep an exact count of all the buffered data
all along the stream, just a rough one sufficient for flow
control.  Besides, with a full-duplex pipe, which direction's
data should be counted?

Returning to the original question, I'd suggest that:
-- fstat(fd) where fd is a pipe should succeed
-- the file should be reported to have zero links,
since that is the case for a pipe (unless a named pipe,
but if you support those you probably have something
else to stat anyway)
-- the file type should be IFIFO if that type exists
in xv6 (which it wouldn't were it a real emulation of
6/e, but I gather that's not the goal), IFREG otherwise
-- permissions probably don't matter much, but for
sanity's sake should be some reasonable constant.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON