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From: Manfred Spraul <manfred@colorfullife.com>
To: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	"Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
	Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org>,
	Sukadev Bhattiprolu <sukadev@us.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] fix sys_unshare()+SEM_UNDO: perform an implicit CLONE_SYSVSEM in CLONE_NEWIPC
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:40:18 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <4803A512.2070405@colorfullife.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20080414150057.GB15667@sergelap.austin.ibm.com>

Serge E. Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Manfred Spraul (manfred@colorfullife.com):
>   
>> sys_unshare(CLONE_NEWIPC) doesn't handle the undo lists properly, this can
>> cause a kernel memory corruption. CLONE_NEWIPC must detach from the existing
>> undo lists.
>> Fix, part 2: perform an implicit CLONE_SYSVSEM in CLONE_NEWIPC.
>> CLONE_NEWIPC creates a new IPC namespace, the task cannot access the
>> existing semaphore arrays after the unshare syscall. Thus the task
>> can/must detach from the existing undo list entries, too.
>>
>> This fixes the kernel corruption, because it makes it impossible that
>> undo records from two different namespaces are in sysvsem.undo_list.
>>     
>
> So this was never an issue with clone(CLONE_NEWIPC|CLONE_SYSVSEM), which
> should have had the same result as unshare(CLONE_NEWIPC&~CLONE_SYSVSEM)?
>
>   
Actually, the story is slightly different:
unshare(CLONE_NEWIPC|CLONE_SYSVSEM) returns -EINVAL right now.

Thus all apps right now call unshare(CLONE_NEWIPC|&~CLONE_SYSVSEM).
This combination doesn't make much sense. Even worse - it easily causes 
a kernel oops.
Thus my fix is twofold:
- add support for unshare(CLONE_SYSVSEM).
- implicitely add CLONE_SYSVSEM to all calls that set CLONE_NEWIPC.

It's not really pretty: If a pivot_namespace syscall is ever added, then 
CLONE_NEWIPC&~CLONE_SYSVSEM would make sense again.
What do you think? Can we break backward compatibility and add
    if ( (unshare_flags & CLONE_NEWIPC) && !(unshare_flags & 
CLONE_SYSVSEM) )
       return -EINVAL;
into sys_unshare()?
I have decided against that, it breaks the current ABI.
And we gain virtually nothing - most if not all unshare users will be 
single threaded apps that do not use sysvsem at all, and even most 
sysvsem users do not use SEM_UNDO.

--
    Manfred

  reply	other threads:[~2008-04-14 18:40 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2008-04-13  8:09 [PATCH 2/2] fix sys_unshare()+SEM_UNDO: perform an implicit CLONE_SYSVSEM in CLONE_NEWIPC Manfred Spraul
2008-04-14 15:00 ` Serge E. Hallyn
2008-04-14 18:40   ` Manfred Spraul [this message]
2008-04-14 19:23     ` Serge E. Hallyn
2008-04-15 18:42       ` Manfred Spraul

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