On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 03:19:51PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote: > On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 09:17:41PM +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote: > > On Feb 12 2020, Florian Weimer wrote: > > > > > * Al Viro: > > > > > >> On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 08:15:08PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > > >> > > >>> | Further, I've found some inconsistent behavior with ext4: chmod on the > > >>> | magic symlink fails with EOPNOTSUPP as in Florian's test, but fchmod > > >>> | on the O_PATH fd succeeds and changes the symlink mode. This is with > > >>> | 5.4. Cany anyone else confirm this? Is it a problem? > > >>> > > >>> It looks broken to me because fchmod (as an inode-changing operation) > > >>> is not supposed to work on O_PATH descriptors. > > >> > > >> Why? O_PATH does have an associated inode just fine; where does > > >> that "not supposed to" come from? > > > > > > It fails on most file systems right now. I thought that was expected. > > > Other system calls (fsetxattr IIRC) do not work on O_PATH descriptors, > > > either. I assumed that an O_PATH descriptor was not intending to > > > confer that capability. Even openat fails. > > > > According to open(2), this is expected: > > > > O_PATH (since Linux 2.6.39) > > Obtain a file descriptor that can be used for two purposes: to > > indicate a location in the filesystem tree and to perform opera- > > tions that act purely at the file descriptor level. The file > > itself is not opened, and other file operations (e.g., read(2), > > write(2), fchmod(2), fchown(2), fgetxattr(2), ioctl(2), mmap(2)) > > fail with the error EBADF. > > That text is outdated and should be corrected. Fixing fchmod fchown, > fstat, etc. to operate on O_PATH file descriptors was a very > intentional change in the kernel. Wait. First of all, in the testcase it's chmod(2) applied to /proc/*/fd/*; that's no different for O_PATH descriptors. Location in the tree *is* associated with O_PATH fd; that's the only thing they exist for. fchmod(2) will certainly fail for those, as it always had: int ksys_fchmod(unsigned int fd, umode_t mode) { struct fd f = fdget(fd); int err = -EBADF; if (f.file) { audit_file(f.file); err = chmod_common(&f.file->f_path, mode); fdput(f); } return err; } SYSCALL_DEFINE2(fchmod, unsigned int, fd, umode_t, mode) { return ksys_fchmod(fd, mode); } ... and that fdget() will give you -EBADF. If you've managed to get fchmod(2) the syscall to give you anything other than that, I want to see details.