On Thu, 22 Nov 2018 15:09:06 -0800 Joel Fernandes [off-list ref] wrote:

Android uses ashmem for sharing memory regions.  We are looking forward to
migrating all usecases of ashmem to memfd so that we can possibly remove
the ashmem driver in the future from staging while also benefiting from
using memfd and contributing to it.  Note staging drivers are also not ABI
and generally can be removed at anytime.

One of the main usecases Android has is the ability to create a region and
mmap it as writeable, then add protection against making any "future"
writes while keeping the existing already mmap'ed writeable-region active.
This allows us to implement a usecase where receivers of the shared
memory buffer can get a read-only view, while the sender continues to
write to the buffer.  See CursorWindow documentation in Android for more
details:
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/database/CursorWindow

This usecase cannot be implemented with the existing F_SEAL_WRITE seal.
To support the usecase, this patch adds a new F_SEAL_FUTURE_WRITE seal
which prevents any future mmap and write syscalls from succeeding while
keeping the existing mmap active.

A better way to do F_SEAL_FUTURE_WRITE seal was discussed [1] last week
where we don't need to modify core VFS structures to get the same
behavior of the seal. This solves several side-effects pointed by Andy.
self-tests are provided in later patch to verify the expected semantics.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181111173650.GA256781@google.com/ (local)

This changelog doesn't have the nifty test case code which was in
earlier versions?