Why do you have a "string" within the kernel and are not using the
normal open() call from userspace on the character device node on the
filesystem in your namespace/mount/whatever?
NVMe-OF is configured using configfs. The target is specified by the
user writing a path to a configfs attribute. This is the way it works
today but with blkdev_get_by_path()[1]. For the passthru code, we need
to get a nvme_ctrl instead of a block_device, but the principal is the same.
Why isn't a fd being passed in there instead of a random string?
I wouldn't know the answer to this but I assume because once we decided
to use configfs, there was no way for the user to pass the kernel an fd.
That's definitely not changing. But this is not different than how we
use the block device or file configuration, this just happen to need the
nvme controller chardev now to issue I/O.
So, as was kind of alluded to in another part of the thread, what are
you doing about permissions? It seems that any user/group permissions
are out the window when you have the kernel itself do the opening of the
char device, right? Why is that ok? You can pass it _any_ character
device node and away it goes? What if you give it a "wrong" one? Char
devices are very different from block devices this way.
We could condition any configfs operation on capable(CAP_NET_ADMIN) to
close that hole for now..
