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Date:   Mon, 13 Jan 2020 21:42:37 +0100
From:   Christian Brauner <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com>
To:     Daniel Colascione <dancol@google.com>
Cc:     Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>,
        Kirill Tkhai <ktkhai@virtuozzo.com>,
        Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>,
        Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>, oleksandr@redhat.com,
        Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>,
        Tim Murray <timmurray@google.com>,
        Sandeep Patil <sspatil@google.com>,
        Sonny Rao <sonnyrao@google.com>,
        Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com>,
        Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>,
        Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>,
        John Dias <joaodias@google.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/4] mm: introduce external memory hinting API
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On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 11:27:03AM -0800, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 11:10 AM Christian Brauner
> <christian.brauner@ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > This does not
> > affect the permission checking you're performing here.
> 
> Pidfds-as-capabilities sounds like a good change. Can you clarify what
> you mean here though? Do you mean that in order to perform some
> process-directed operation X on process Y, the pidfd passed to X must
> have been opened with PIDFD_CAP_X *and* the process *using* the pidfds
> must be able to perform operation X on process Y? Or do pidfds in this
> model "carry" permissions in the same way that an ordinary file
> descriptor "carries" the ability to write to a file if it was opened
> with O_WRONLY even if the FD is passed to a process that couldn't
> otherwise write to that file? Right now, pidfds are identity-only and
> always rely on the caller's permissions. I like the capability bit
> model because it makes pidfds more consistent with other file
> descriptors and enabled delegation of capabilities across the system.

I'm going back and forth on this. My initial implementation has it that
you'd need both, PIDFD_FLAG/CAP_X and the process using the pidfd must
be able to perform the operation X on process Y. The alternative becomes
tricky for e.g. anything that requires ptrace_may_access() permissions
such as getting an fd out from another task based on its pidfd and so
on.

Christian