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Re: Request for comments: reserving a value for O_SEARCH and O_EXEC


On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 04:51:59PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 06, 2013 at 10:36:10AM -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > This is frustrating because early on in the O_PATH discussions on LKML
> > when it was first added, there were requests for O_SEARCH and O_EXEC
> > semantics in the kernel, and these requests were rejected with the
> > response being roughly "you can do it in userspace using the more
> > general O_PATH approach". So we have two contradictory conditions:
> > 
> > - O_SEARCH/O_EXEC semantics won't be added in the kernel because you
> >   can do it in userspace with O_PATH.
> > 
> > - O_SEARCH/O_EXEC can't be added in userspace because they can't be
> >   assigned a value without having an implementation in kernelspace.
> > 
> > If there's a willingness to override/drop that previous decision
> > (which I believe Linus was in on, but I'd have to search for the old
> > threads again)
> 
> Yes, Linus has complained about it.  Probably rightly so because the
> O_EXEC and O_SEARCH semantics don't seem overly useful.

I really don't want to have the argument over whether they're useful.
I just want to be able to provide them to applications since they're
required by the standard and useful to applications as the only
portable way to achieve things that you could otherwise not achieve
without Linux-specific tricks. And I don't want the implementation I
provide to have security bugs (which it does without an ability to
give O_NOFOLLOW the POSIX semantics). I'm perfectly happy with
accepting a judgement from Linus that they don't belong in the kernel,
as long as there's a way to implement it in userspace without clashing
with future use of flag/mode bits by the kernel for other purposes.

> Besides the symlink semantics I think we should really get a narrow
> implementation of it, that is really forbid everything but executing
> it (if S_IREG()) or performing openat on it (if S_ISDIR).

This is non-conforming. POSIX makes no provision that fchmod, fchown,
fstat, fchdir, etc. can or must fail on descriptors opened with
O_SEARCH or O_EXEC. The mode used for opening is generally irrelevant
to these functions (for example, whether you can fchmod is a function
of the file's ownership and the process's privileges, not whether the
function was opened with write access) and, unless specified
otherwise, the same principle applies to these new access modes.

> For that we'd also want to move fexec(ve) into the kernel space.

I agree this would be useful, but it's a separate issue.

> > If I do this, do you have a recommendation on the value to use? My
> > guess for the best choice would be O_PATH|3, so that O_PATH, O_SEARCH,
> > O_EXEC, O_RDONLY, O_WRONLY, and O_RDWR can all fall under O_ACCMODE
> > without adding more than one bit to O_ACCMODE. If we do it this way,
> > the patch should also make it so the extra bits (bits 0 and 1) set at
> > open time should be preserved when fcntl(F_GETFL) is called so that
> > the application correctly sees the access mode it requested.
> 
> Note that "3" aready has a magic meaning on Linux:
> 
> "Linux  reserves  the special, nonstandard access mode 3 (binary 11) in flags
>  to mean: check for read and write permission on the file and return a
>  descriptor that can't be used for reading or writing.  This nonstandard
>  access mode is  used  by  some Linux drivers to return a descriptor that
>  is to be used only for device-specific ioctl(2) operations."
> 
> Given that it's limited to device nodes and a somewhat similar limitation
> to O_SEARCH and O_EXEC it doesn't sound too bad.

Thanks for digging this up. I observed the behavior but couldn't find
anywhere it was documented. I wasn't aware that it was checking for
both read and write permission, though, and assumed it was just
checking for read. This is somewhat unfortunate, as on old kernels
without O_PATH, O_PATH|3 would fail to open directories, whereas plain
O_PATH succeeds as long as you have read permission, thus providing an
acceptable "low quality fallback implementation" of O_SEARCH and
O_EXEC on old kernels.

Of course, the userspace fallback code could detect such failures and
retry with O_RDONLY, so maybe it's not such a big issue. With a
working O_PATH, open should never fail with EISDIR or EACCES, so these
errors could be used as a condition to retry.

Rich


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