Simon McVittie b478f3e737 tests: Assert that glnx_close_fd preserves errno
We document glnx_close_fd as preserving errno, so let's assert that it
really does. There are three code paths we need to exercise:

1. fd < 0: glnx_close_fd does nothing, successfully
2. fd >= 0 and close() succeeds
3. fd >= 0 and close() fails

The first two are easy, but it's difficult to make close() fail on-demand
with only valid code. close(2) documents EIO, but it's difficult to
cause an I/O error on-demand. Similarly, close(2) documents ENOSPC
and EDQUOT on NFS, but we are unlikely to have a full NFS filesystem
available during testing.

Instead, we can trigger a failure via the programming error of passing a
fd to glnx_close_fd that was already closed, which makes close(2) fail
with EBADF. In older libglnx, we wouldn't have been able to test this
because it caused an assertion failure, but in GLib and new libglnx it
only causes a critical warning, which we can catch and ignore.

See also GLib commit GNOME/glib@f1f711dc "tests: Test EBADF and errno
handling when closing fds". GLib doesn't have a 1:1 equivalent of
glnx_close_fd as public API, but an internal version is used to
implement g_autofd.

Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>
2026-04-07 16:03:31 +01:00
2026-02-18 00:35:43 +01:00
2026-03-17 18:40:38 +01:00
2026-02-21 01:29:05 +01:00
2026-03-12 00:41:48 +01:00

libglnx is the successor to libgsystem.

It is for modules which depend on both GLib and Linux, intended to be used as a git submodule.

Features:

  • File APIs which use openat() like APIs, but also take a GCancellable to support dynamic cancellation
  • APIs also have a GError parameter
  • High level "shutil", somewhat inspired by Python's
  • A "console" API for tty output
  • A backport of the GLib cleanup macros for projects which can't yet take a dependency on 2.40.

Why?

There are multiple projects which have a hard dependency on Linux and GLib, such as NetworkManager, ostree, flatpak, etc. It makes sense for them to be able to share Linux-specific APIs.

This module also contains some code taken from systemd, which has very high quality LGPLv2+ shared library code, but most of the internal shared library is private, and not namespaced.

One could also compare this project to gnulib; the salient differences there are that at least some of this module is eventually destined for inclusion in GLib.

Adding this to your project

Meson

First, set up a Git submodule:

git submodule add https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libglnx subprojects/libglnx

Or a Git subtree:

git remote add libglnx https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libglnx.git
git fetch libglnx
git subtree add -P subprojects/libglnx libglnx/master

Then, in your top-level meson.build:

libglnx_dep = subproject('libglnx').get_variable('libglnx_dep')
# now use libglnx_dep in your dependencies

Porting from libgsystem

For all of the filesystem access code, libglnx exposes only fd-relative API, not GFile*. It does use GCancellable where applicable.

For local allocation macros, you should start using the g_auto macros from GLib. A backport is included in libglnx. There are a few APIs not defined in GLib yet, such as glnx_autofd.

gs_transfer_out_value is replaced by g_steal_pointer.

Contributing

Development happens in GNOME Gitlab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libglnx

(If you're seeing this on the Github mirror, we used to do development on Github but that was before GNOME deployed Gitlab.)

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