The problem is that a pathname can contain absolute symlinks and now they are resolved relative to the current root. If we want to open a file in another mount namespaces and we have a file descriptor to its root directory, we probably want to resolve pathname in the target mount namespace. Here are examples how we can open a file in a contex of another process. How we can do this without these changes: old_root = open("/", O_PATH); old_cwd = open(".", O_PATH); chroot("/proc/PID/root"); fd = open(pathname, O_RDONLY); fchdir(old_root); /* emulate fchroot() */ chroot("."); fchdir(old_cwd); close(old_cwd); close(old_root); How this code is simplified with new flags: dirfd = open("/proc/PID/root", O_PATH); fd = open(dirfd, pathname, O_RDONLY | O_ATROOT); close(dirfd); One more thing is that chroot isn't avaliable for unprivileged users. We met this problem, when we tryed to dump an ubuntu container and failed to resolve /proc/PID/root/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock, because /var/run was a symlink to /run. Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Andrey Vagin <avagin@xxxxxxxxxx> Andrey Vagin (2): namei: add LOOKUP_DFD_ROOT to use dfd as root fs: allow to use dirfd as root for openat and other *at syscalls fs/exec.c | 4 +++- fs/namei.c | 22 +++++++++++++++++----- fs/open.c | 6 +++++- fs/stat.c | 4 +++- fs/utimes.c | 4 +++- include/linux/namei.h | 2 ++ include/uapi/asm-generic/fcntl.h | 3 +++ include/uapi/linux/fcntl.h | 1 + 8 files changed, 37 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-) -- 2.5.5 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html