commit 4e816d8bc53acbe5e9837a6e00818e1d0de73413
author iximeow <iximeow@oxide.computer> Fri Oct 17 16:41:55 2025 +0000
committer iximeow <me@iximeow.net> Mon Oct 20 02:39:55 2025 +0000
tree 9319873d50f7f055d4bd98150d435979cdece68b
parent a41214f9bd7ce869d21898f31107f92c90a9112f

Do not GC the current active incremental session directory

In `setup_dep_graph`, we set up a session directory for the current
incremental compilation session, load the dep graph, and then GC stale
incremental compilation sessions for the crate. The freshly-created
session directory ends up in this list of potentially-GC'd directories
but in practice is not typically even considered for GC because the new
directory is neither finalized nor `is_old_enough_to_be_collected`.

Unfortunately, `is_old_enough_to_be_collected` is a simple time check,
and if `load_dep_graph` is slow enough it's possible for the
freshly-created session directory to be tens of seconds old already.
Then, old enough to be *eligible* to GC, we try to `flock::Lock` it as
proof it is not owned by anyone else, and so is a stale working
directory.

Because we hold the lock in the same process, the behavior of
`flock::Lock` is dependent on platform-specifics about file locking
APIs. `fcntl(F_SETLK)`-style locks used on non-Linux Unices do not
provide mutual exclusion internal to a process. `fcntl_locking(2)` on
Linux describes some relevant problems:

```
       The record locks described above are associated with the process
       (unlike the open file description locks described below).  This
       has some unfortunate consequences:

       *  If a process closes any file descriptor referring to a file,
          then all of the process's locks on that file are released, [...]

       *  The threads in a process share locks.  In other words, a
          multithreaded program can't use record locking to ensure that
          threads don't simultaneously access the same region of a file.
```

`fcntl`-locks will appear to succeed to lock the fresh incremental
compilation directory, at which point we can remove it just before using
it later for incremental compilation. Saving incremental compilation
state later fails and takes rustc with it with an error like
```
[..]/target/debug/incremental/crate-<hash>/<name>/dep-graph.part.bin: No such file or directory (os error 2)
```

The release-lock-on-close behavior has uncomfortable consequences for
the freshly-opened file description for the lock, but I think in
practice isn't an issue. If we would close the file, we failed to
acquire the lock, so someone else had the lock ad we're not releasing
locks prematurely.

`flock(LOCK_EX)` doesn't seem to have these same issues, and because
`flock::Lock::new` always opens a new file description when locking, I
don't think Linux can have this issue.

From reading `LockFileEx` on MSDN I *think* Windows has locking
semantics similar to `flock`, but I haven't tested there at all.

My conclusion is that there is no way to write a pure-POSIX
`flock::Lock::new` which guarantees mutual exclusion across different
file descriptions of the same file in the same process, and
`flock::Lock::new` must not be used for that purpose. So, instead, avoid
considering the current incremental session directory for GC in the
first place. Our own `sess` is evidence we're alive and using it.