[Devel] Re: [RFC][PATCH] fork: Don't special case CLONE_NEWPID for process or sessions

[Eric W. Biederman]

Pavel Emelyanov <xemul at openvz.org> writes:

> Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>
> Sorry for the late answer, I have just noticed that I forgot to
> answer on this patch.

Thanks for answering.

>> Given that the kernel supports sys_setsid we don't need a special case
>> in fork if we want to set: session == pgrp == pid.
>> 
>> The historical (although not 2.6) linux behavior has been to start the
>> init with session == pgrp == 0 which is effectively what removing this
>> special case will do. 
>
> Hm... I overlooked this fact. Looks like the namespace's init will
> have them set to 1.

Yes.  It is not a big difference as init can handle being exec'd by
something else, thus is expected to be able to handle the case where
setsid has already been called. 

So we are good but your current code makes it impossible to set
tsk->signal->leader and become a proper session leader which is
painful.

>> can we remove it and save some code, make copy_process easier to read
>> easier to maintain, and possibly a little faster?
>> 
>> I know it is a little weird belong to a process groups that isn't
>> visible in your pid namespace, but it there are no good reasons
>> why it shouldn't work.
>
> This is not good to have such a situation as the init will have
> the ability to kill the tasks from the namespace he can't see,
> e.g. his parent and the processes in that group.

Yes. sys_kill(0, SIGXXX) will allow this.

As this is the main reason for this I don't see any reason to keep
the current clone behavior.

Sending signals to our process group and our parent is an ability that
we allow even the most untrusted processes normally, and it is an
ability we can easily remove simply by calling setsid.

Not doing magic with the session and the process group allows init
to properly become a session leader when setsid is called.

Starting with a shared session and process group makes it more likely 
kernel implementors will look closely to ensure they handle strange
cases like this properly and that developers using CLONE_NEWPID will
look closely to ensure there are not other pid gotchas the need to
deal with.

Sharing the process group, session and controlling tty of our parent
can be an advantage in small scenarios where using an existing
controlling tty is an advantage.  Think of a chroot build root or a
chroot rpm install.  Not letting processes escape and become deaemons
is an advantage, but it really doesn't matter if they send signals to
their parent.

When isolation is important we do not want the ability to send signals
to outside of the pid namespace.  Currently except for the child death
signal of init it appears that simply calling setsid is enough.

So short of any other objections I think I will brush up this patch and
send it along to Andrew.

Eric
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