[Devel] Re: [patch -mm 1/5] mqueue namespace : add struct mq_namespace

[Cedric Le Goater]

Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> sukadev at us.ibm.com writes:
> 
>> Cedric Le Goater [clg at fr.ibm.com] wrote:
>> | 
>> | >> however, we have an issue with the signal notification in __do_notify()
>> | >> we could kill a process in a different pid namespace.
>> | > 
>> | > So I took a quick look at the code as it is (before this patchset)
>> | > and the taking a reference to a socket and the taking a reference to
>> | > a struct pid should do the right thing when we intersect with other
>> | > namespaces.  It certainly does not look like a fundamental issue.
>>
>> | 
>> | right. this should be covered when the pid namespace signal handling is 
>> | complete. kill_pid_info() should fail to send a signal to a sibling or 
>> | a parent pid namespace. 
>> | 
>> | I guess we should add a WARNING() to say that we're attempting to do so.
>>
>> Just want to clarify how a signal is sent to a parent ns.
>>
>> 	A process P1 sets itself up to be notified when a message arrives
>> 	on a queue.
>>
>> 	P1 then clones P2 with CLONE_NEWPID.
>>
>> 	P2 writes to the message queue and thus signals P1
>>
>> What should the semantics be here ?
>>
>> I guess it makes less sense for two namespaces to be dependent on the same
>> message queue this way.  But, if P2 writes to the queue, technically, the
>> queue is not empty, so P1 should be notified, no ? 
> 
> Sounds right to me.

It's right for the mqueue namespace but wrong for the pid namespace because
we will possibly send a signal to a sibling pid namespace.
 
>> This sounds similar to the SIGIO signal case (F_SETOWN). My understanding
>> was that we would notify whoever was set to receive the notification, even
>> if they were in a parent ns (again my reasoning was its based on the state
>> of a file).
> 
> Yep.
> 
>> IOW,  should we change kill_pid_info() ?  If the caller can 'see' the
>> 'struct pid' they can signal it. The expectation was that callers would
>> call find_vpid() and thus only see processes in their namespace.
> 
> Ok.  Now I'm concerned.
> 
> I deliberately designed the initial pid namespace infrastructure to allow
> mixing like this.  Because it is the right thing to do.
> 
> The expectation is that in general namespaces provide isolation simply
> because you cannot see and thus cannot interact with other processes.
> However isolation is not the purpose in life of namespaces and if you
> use them in more creative ways mixing should work just fine.  But
> you have to use all of the namespaces together, and you have
> to carefully set things up to guarantee isolation.
> 
> The really challenging case to handle here  is what happens if we are
> signaling to someone in a sibling pid namespace.  What do we set the
> parent pid in the siginfo struct to.  I think we agreed that 0 (blame
> the kernel) is the appropriate pid last time we talked about this.

0 seems appropriate for signal coming from a parent namespace, yes. but
here we could be sending a signal from 

> I'm worried now that the concept of vpid has confused someone.  It
> still doesn't feel right to me to call one pid value more or less
> virtual then any other so the concept of a virtual pid doesn't make
> sense to me.  The way I have always thought of it is:
> - pid_nr(struct pid *) 
>   The pid in the current pid namespace.
> - __pid_nr(struct pid_namespace, struct pid *) 
>   The pid in some specified pid namespace.
> 
> With struct pid being defined to be global and doing something
> appropriate in all pid namespaces.
> 
> Thinking about this concern that Cedric raises is actually independent
> of the mqueue namespace and seems to be totally a pid namespace thing.
> Because the only way this happens if we happen to share the mqueue
> namespace. (i.e. what we are doing now).
> 
> 
> Eric

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