Re: [PATCH v2 2/7] kernel/fork: factor out replacing the current MM exe_file

Linus Torvalds
2021-08-22T18:05:12Z

On Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 7:36 AM Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>
> I think this check is there to keep from changing /proc/self/exe
> arbitrarily.

Well, you pretty much can already. You just have to jump through a few hoops.

> Maybe it is all completely silly and we should not care about the code
> that thinks /proc/self/exe is a reliable measure of anything, but short
> of that I think we should either keep the code or put in some careful
> thought as to which restrictions make sense when changing
> /proc/self/exe.

I think the important ones are already there: checking that it is (a)
an executable and (b) that we have execute permission to it.

I also think the code is actually racy - while we are checking "did
the old mm_exe file have any mappings", there's nothing that keeps
another thread from changing the exe file to another one that _does_
have mappings, and then we'll happily replace it with yet another file
because we checked the old one, not the new one it was replaced by in
the meantime.

Of course, that "race" doesn't really matter - exactly because this
isn't about security, it's just a random "let's test that immaterial
thing, and we don't actually care about corner cases".

So I'm not saying that race needs to be fixed - I'm just pointing it
out as an example of how nonsensical the test really is. It's not
fundamental to anything, it's just a random "let's test this odd
condition".

That said, I don't care _that_ much. I'm happy with David's series, I
just think that once we don't do this at a mmap level any more, the
"go look for mappings" code makes little sense.

So we can leave it, and remove it later if people agree.

Linus