[Devel] Re: [PATCH 2/4] The character devices layer changes

[Pavel Emelyanov]

Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Pavel Emelyanov (xemul at openvz.org):
>> These changes include the API for the control group
>> to map/remap/unmap the devices with their permissions
>> and one important thing.
>>
>> The fact is that the struct cdev is cached in the inode
>> for faster access, so once we looked one up we go through
>> the fast path and omit the kobj_lookup() call. This is no
>> longer good when we restrict the access to cdevs.
>>
>> To address this issue, I store the last_perm and last(_map)
>> fields on the struct cdev (and protect them with the cdev_lock)
>> and force the re-lookup in the kobj mappings if needed.
>>
>> I know, this might be slow, but I have two points for it:
>> 1. The re-lookup happens on open() only which is not
>>    a fast-path. Besides, this is so for block layer and
>>    nobody complains;
>> 2. On a well-isolated setup, when each container has its
>>    own filesystem this is no longer a problem - each
>>    cgroup will cache the cdev on its inode and work good.
> 
> What about simply returning -EPERM when open()ing a cdev
> with ->map!=task_cdev_map(current)?

In this case it will HAVE to setup isolated filesystem for
each cgroup. I thought that this flexibility doesn't hurt.

> Shouldn't be a problem for ttys, since the container init
> already has the tty open, right?

Yup, but this is not the case for /dev/null or /dev/zero.

> Otherwise, the patchset looks good to me.  Want to look
> through this one a little more (i think that'd be easier
> with the -EPERM approach) and scrutinize patch 4, but
> overall it makes sense.

OK, thanks.

> If I understand right, we're taking 14k per cgroup for
> kobjmaps?  Do we consider that a problem?

14k? I allocate the struct kobj_map which is only 256 pointers
(i.e. - 2K) and the struct probe that is 32 bytes. I.e. 4k
or a single page. I think this is OK.

> thanks,
> -serge
> 

[snip]
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