[Devel] Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Resend - Use procfs to change a syscall behavior

[Pavel Machek]

On Thu 2008-07-10 10:53:35, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 10:54 +0200, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > 
> > If you don't see a backward compatibility problem here, perhaps you
> > should not be hacking kernel...? The way ids are assigned is certainly
> > part of syscall semantics (applications rely on), at least for open.
> 
> We also used to have a pretty defined ordering for handing out address
> space with mmap().  That all changed with address space randomization.
> Are file descriptors different somehow?
> 
> Anyway, it's not like we're actually changing existing behavior.  An
> application has to do something special and new to trigger this new
> behavior.  Nobody is going to stumble over it, and it will *not* break
> backward compatibility.

It will break compatibility, but not in a way you expect. There's
application called "subterfugue" that monitors other applications
using ptrace and enforces security policy (or does other stuff). Such
hacks depend on existing syscalls behaving in a way they are
specified...

Then you'll have to update open.2 man page:

DESCRIPTION
       Given a pathname for a file, open() returns a file descriptor,
a small, non-
       negative integer for use in  subsequent  system  calls
(read(2),  write(2),
       lseek(2),  fcntl(2),  etc.).   The  file descriptor returned by
a successful
       call will be the lowest-numbered file descriptor not currently
open for  the
       process.

...you'll need to add "unless someone write some number in file in
/proc somewhere"... hmm... is new behaviour even POSIX compliant?
open() is specified in POSIX...

Ok, so it will not break too many apps... but echo "123 >
/proc/something" breaking bash (etc) is not nice.

(Plus proposed interface is so ugly that this discussion is moot.)

									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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