On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 03:11:56PM +0100, Al Viro wrote: > On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 07:34:35PM +0530, Aneesh Kumar K.V wrote: > > > I looked at dnotify_flush, they remove markers on an inode. > > But then it also checks for filp to match. So I am not sure > > whether skipping dnotify_flush for O_PATH descriptor have any impact. We > > can't use O_PATH descriptor for dnotify fcntl any way. So in > > dnotify_flush we will not match the filp. > > > > Viro, > > > > Any reason why we skip dnotify_flush ? > > See your last sentence above - why bother finding the mark, scanning the > list, etc. when we know that there won't be any matches? [Apologies for replying to the wrong posting, but this is the closest thing thread-wise to what I wanted to reply to that I've got sitting in my mailbox] The rules are: * syscalls acting purely on descriptor level are allowed - close(), dup(), dup2(), dup3(), fcntl(F_DUPFD{,_CLOEXEC}), fcntl(F_[SG]ETFD), fcntl(F_GETFL), passing descriptors in SCM_RIGHTS datagrams) * syscalls using the descriptor just to indicate a location in the tree - *at() family, fchdir(), fstat() The list might get expanded - for example, fstatfs() arguably belongs to the second group. The approach had been conservative - the second group gets expanded on per-case basis. E.g. anything requiring the file to have been opened for write is *not* a candidate, so it really has to be reviewed separately for each syscall of that sort. As far as dnotify and POSIX locks go, close() (and replacing dup2(), etc.) are irrelevant - the rules are exactly as usual. All dnotify watches or POSIX locks associated with that opened file get evicted; it's just that there is no way to *set* them on O_PATH descriptors in the first place. We might eventually allow fcntl(F_NOTIFY) on them, but I'm not sure there's any good reason to do so; allowing to use them for setting POSIX locks is almost certainly a bad idea wrt security. The test in filp_close() is just an optimization - if/when we allow F_NOTIFY on O_PATH descriptors, the same commit will need to make the call of dnotify_flush() in filp_open() unconditional. All there is to it... -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html