Re: [PATCH 00/17] VFS: Filesystem information and notifications [ver #17]

Christian Brauner
2020-03-03T11:57:04Z

On Tue, Mar 03, 2020 at 12:33:48PM +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 11:25 AM Christian Brauner
> <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 03, 2020 at 11:13:50AM +0100, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > > On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 11:00 AM Christian Brauner
> > > <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> wrote:
>
> > > > More magic links to beam you around sounds like a bad idea. We had a
> > > > bunch of CVEs around them in containers and they were one of the major
> > > > reasons behind us pushing for openat2(). That's why it has a
> > > > RESOLVE_NO_MAGICLINKS flag.
> > >
> > > No, that link wouldn't beam you around at all, it would end up in an
> > > internally mounted instance of a mountfs, a safe place where no
> >
> > Even if it is a magic link to a safe place it's a magic link. They
> > aren't a great solution to this problem. fsinfo() is cleaner and
> > simpler as it creates a context for a supervised mount which gives the a
> > managing application fine-grained control and makes it easily
> > extendable.
>
> Yeah, it's a nice and clean interface in the ioctl(2) sense. Sure,
> fsinfo() is way better than ioctl(), but it at the core it's still the
> same syscall multiplexer, do everything hack.

In contrast to a generic ioctl() it's a domain-specific separate
syscall. You can't suddenly set kvm options through fsinfo() I would
hope. I find it at least debatable that a new filesystem is preferable.
And - feel free to simply dismiss the concerns I expressed - so far
there has not been a lot of excitement about this idea.

>
> > Also, we're apparently at the point where it seems were suggesting
> > another (pseudo)filesystem to get information about filesystems.
>
> Implementation detail. Why would you care?

I wouldn't call this an implementation detail. That's quite a big
design choice; it's a separate fileystem. In addition, implementation
details need to be maintained.

Christian