From b3e5838252665ee4cfa76b82bdf1198dca81e5be Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Christian Brauner Date: Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:04:15 +0100 Subject: clone: add CLONE_PIDFD This patchset makes it possible to retrieve pid file descriptors at process creation time by introducing the new flag CLONE_PIDFD to the clone() system call. Linus originally suggested to implement this as a new flag to clone() instead of making it a separate system call. As spotted by Linus, there is exactly one bit for clone() left. CLONE_PIDFD creates file descriptors based on the anonymous inode implementation in the kernel that will also be used to implement the new mount api. They serve as a simple opaque handle on pids. Logically, this makes it possible to interpret a pidfd differently, narrowing or widening the scope of various operations (e.g. signal sending). Thus, a pidfd cannot just refer to a tgid, but also a tid, or in theory - given appropriate flag arguments in relevant syscalls - a process group or session. A pidfd does not represent a privilege. This does not imply it cannot ever be that way but for now this is not the case. A pidfd comes with additional information in fdinfo if the kernel supports procfs. The fdinfo file contains the pid of the process in the callers pid namespace in the same format as the procfs status file, i.e. "Pid:\t%d". As suggested by Oleg, with CLONE_PIDFD the pidfd is returned in the parent_tidptr argument of clone. This has the advantage that we can give back the associated pid and the pidfd at the same time. To remove worries about missing metadata access this patchset comes with a sample program that illustrates how a combination of CLONE_PIDFD, and pidfd_send_signal() can be used to gain race-free access to process metadata through /proc/. The sample program can easily be translated into a helper that would be suitable for inclusion in libc so that users don't have to worry about writing it themselves. Suggested-by: Linus Torvalds Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner Co-developed-by: Jann Horn Signed-off-by: Jann Horn Reviewed-by: Oleg Nesterov Cc: Arnd Bergmann Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Kees Cook Cc: Thomas Gleixner Cc: David Howells Cc: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" Cc: Andy Lutomirsky Cc: Andrew Morton Cc: Aleksa Sarai Cc: Linus Torvalds Cc: Al Viro --- include/linux/pid.h | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) (limited to 'include/linux/pid.h') diff --git a/include/linux/pid.h b/include/linux/pid.h index b6f4ba16065a..3c8ef5a199ca 100644 --- a/include/linux/pid.h +++ b/include/linux/pid.h @@ -66,6 +66,8 @@ struct pid extern struct pid init_struct_pid; +extern const struct file_operations pidfd_fops; + static inline struct pid *get_pid(struct pid *pid) { if (pid) -- cgit v1.2.3-59-g8ed1b