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Date:   Tue, 20 Nov 2018 01:32:50 +0100
From:   Christian Brauner <christian@brauner.io>
To:     Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org>
Cc:     Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.ws>,
        Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>,
        "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        "Serge E. Hallyn" <serge@hallyn.com>, Jann Horn <jannh@google.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Oleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>,
        Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>,
        Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>,
        Linux FS Devel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>,
        Tim Murray <timmurray@google.com>,
        linux-man <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v1 2/2] signal: add procfd_signal() syscall
Message-ID: <20181120003247.a776bej54baxqoxv@brauner.io>
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 <CAKOZuetQDziWeRLydHbDNv1abGM3LyF=WohLFvbzmtdT_+nBdg@mail.gmail.com>
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On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 04:27:49PM -0800, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 3:07 PM Tycho Andersen <tycho@tycho.ws> wrote:
> > > These tools also care about ioctls. Adding a system call is a pain,
> > > but the solution is to make adding system calls less of a pain, not to
> > > permanently make the Linux ABI worse.
> >
> > For user-defined values of "worse" :)
> >
> 
> I tend to agree with Tycho here.  But I'm wondering if it might be
> worth considering a better ioctl.
> 
> /me dons flame-proof hat
> 
> We could do:
> 
> long better_ioctl(int fd, u32 nr, const void *inbuf, size_t inlen,
> const void *outbuf, size_t outlen);

I'm the writer of this patch so take this with a grain of salt.
I think it is a bad idea to stop this patch and force us to introduce a
new type of ioctl().
An ioctl() is also not easy to use for this task because we want to add
a siginfo_t argument which I actually think provides value and makes
this interface more useful.

> 
> and have a central table in the kernel listing all possible nr values
> along with which driver they belong to.  We could have a sane
> signature and get rid of the nr collision problem.
> 
> The major problem I see is that u32 isn't really enough to have a sane
> way to allow out-of-tree drivers to use this, and that we can't
> readily use anything bigger than u32 without indirection because we're
> out of syscall argument space.