From: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
To: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>,
Aleksa Sarai <asarai@suse.de>,
linux-man@vger.kernel.org, linux-api@vger.kernel.org,
linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH man-pages v2 2/2] openat2.2: document new openat2(2) syscall
Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2020 01:39:11 +1100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20200331143911.lokfoq3lqfri2mgy@yavin.dot.cyphar.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1567baea-5476-6d21-4f03-142def0f62e3@gmail.com>
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 3915 bytes --]
On 2020-03-30, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <mtk.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Aleksa,
>
> On 2/2/20 4:19 PM, Aleksa Sarai wrote:
> > Rather than trying to merge the new syscall documentation into open.2
> > (which would probably result in the man-page being incomprehensible),
> > instead the new syscall gets its own dedicated page with links between
> > open(2) and openat2(2) to avoid duplicating information such as the list
> > of O_* flags or common errors.
> >
> > In addition to describing all of the key flags, information about the
> > extensibility design is provided so that users can better understand why
> > they need to pass sizeof(struct open_how) and how their programs will
> > work across kernels. After some discussions with David Laight, I also
> > included explicit instructions to zero the structure to avoid issues
> > when recompiling with new headers.
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
>
> Thanks. I've applied this patch, but also done quite a lot of
> editing of the page. The current draft is below (and also pushed
> to Git). Could I ask you to review the page, to see if I injected
> any error during my edits.
Looks good to me.
> In addition, I've added a number of FIXMEs in comments
> in the page source. Can you please check these, and let me
> know your thoughts.
Will do, see below.
> .\" FIXME I find the "previously-functional systems" in the previous
> .\" sentence a little odd (since openat2() ia new sysycall), so I would
> .\" like to clarify a little...
> .\" Are you referring to the scenario where someone might take an
> .\" existing application that uses openat() and replaces the uses
> .\" of openat() with openat2()? In which case, is it correct to
> .\" understand that you mean that one should not just indiscriminately
> .\" add the RESOLVE_NO_XDEV flag to all of the openat2() calls?
> .\" If I'm not on the right track, could you point me in the right
> .\" direction please.
This is mostly meant as a warning to hopefully avoid applications
because the developer didn't realise that system paths may contain
symlinks or bind-mounts. For an application which has switched to
openat2() and then uses RESOLVE_NO_SYMLINKS for a non-security reason,
it's possible that on some distributions (or future versions of a
distribution) that their application will stop working because a system
path suddenly contains a symlink or is a bind-mount.
This was a concern which was brought up on LWN some time ago. If you can
think of a phrasing that makes this more clear, I'd appreciate it.
> .\" FIXME: what specific details in symlink(7) are being referred
> .\" by the following sentence? It's not clear.
The section on magic-links, but you're right that the sentence ordering
is a bit odd. It should probably go after the first sentence.
> .\" FIXME I found the following hard to understand (in particular, the
> .\" meaning of "scoped" is unclear) , and reworded as below. Is it okay?
> .\" Absolute symbolic links and ".." path components will be scoped to
> .\" .IR dirfd .
Scoped does broadly mean "interpreted relative to", though the
difference is mainly that when I said scoped it's meant to be more of an
assertive claim ("the kernel promises to always treat this path inside
dirfd"). But "interpreted relative to" is a clearer way of phrasing the
semantics, so I'm okay with this change.
> .\" FIXME The next piece is unclear (to me). What kind of ".." escape
> .\" attempts does chroot() not detect that RESOLVE_IN_ROOT does?
If the root is moved, you can escape from a chroot(2). But this sentence
might not really belong in a man-page since it's describing (important)
aspects of the implementation and not the semantics.
--
Aleksa Sarai
Senior Software Engineer (Containers)
SUSE Linux GmbH
<https://www.cyphar.com/>
[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 228 bytes --]
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-03-31 14:39 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-02-02 15:19 [PATCH man-pages v2 0/2] document openat2(2) Aleksa Sarai
2020-02-02 15:19 ` [PATCH man-pages v2 1/2] path_resolution.7: update to mention openat2(2) features Aleksa Sarai
2020-03-30 20:38 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-02-02 15:19 ` [PATCH man-pages v2 2/2] openat2.2: document new openat2(2) syscall Aleksa Sarai
2020-03-30 9:08 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-03-30 9:20 ` Aleksa Sarai
2020-03-30 9:36 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-03-30 9:48 ` Aleksa Sarai
2020-03-30 20:43 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-03-31 14:39 ` Aleksa Sarai [this message]
2020-04-01 6:38 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-04-08 21:29 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-04-12 16:49 ` Aleksa Sarai
2020-04-13 7:22 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-04-14 10:35 ` Aleksa Sarai
2020-04-15 20:24 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-05-04 10:17 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
2020-06-10 5:53 ` [PATCH] symlink.7: document magic-links more completely Aleksa Sarai
2020-06-19 13:00 ` Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20200331143911.lokfoq3lqfri2mgy@yavin.dot.cyphar.com \
--to=cyphar@cyphar.com \
--cc=asarai@suse.de \
--cc=christian@brauner.io \
--cc=linux-api@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=linux-man@vger.kernel.org \
--cc=mtk.manpages@gmail.com \
--cc=viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).