On 2019-09-09, Mickaël Salaün wrote: > On 09/09/2019 12:12, James Morris wrote: > > On Mon, 9 Sep 2019, Mickaël Salaün wrote: > >> As I said, O_MAYEXEC should be ignored if it is not supported by the > >> kernel, which perfectly fit with the current open(2) flags behavior, and > >> should also behave the same with openat2(2). > > > > The problem here is programs which are already using the value of > > O_MAYEXEC, which will break. Hence, openat2(2). > > Well, it still depends on the sysctl, which doesn't enforce anything by > default, hence doesn't break existing behavior, and this unused flags > could be fixed/removed or reported by sysadmins or distro developers. Okay, but then this means that new programs which really want to enforce O_MAYEXEC (and know that they really do want this feature) won't be able to unless an admin has set the relevant sysctl. Not to mention that the old-kernel fallback will not cover the "it's disabled by the sysctl" case -- so the fallback handling would need to be: int fd = open("foo", O_MAYEXEC|O_RDONLY); if (!(fcntl(fd, F_GETFL) & O_MAYEXEC)) fallback(); if (!sysctl_feature_is_enabled) fallback(); However, there is still a race here -- if an administrator enables O_MAYEXEC after the program gets the fd, then you still won't hit the fallback (and you can't tell that O_MAYEXEC checks weren't done). You could fix the issue with the sysctl by clearing O_MAYEXEC from f_flags if the sysctl is disabled. You could also avoid some of the problems with it being a global setting by making it a prctl(2) which processes can opt-in to (though this has its own major problems). Sorry, but I'm just really not a fan of this. -- Aleksa Sarai Senior Software Engineer (Containers) SUSE Linux GmbH