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Date:   Wed, 15 Jun 2022 10:00:00 +0200
From:   Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
To:     Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>
Cc:     Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>, Andrei Vagin <avagin@gmail.com>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Dmitry Safonov <0x7f454c46@gmail.com>, linux-mm@kvack.org,
        Eric Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] fs/exec: allow to unshare a time namespace on
 vfork+exec
Message-ID: <20220615080000.qtxeosohhyfabzmg@wittgenstein>
References: <20220613060723.197407-1-avagin@gmail.com>
 <202206141412.2B0732FF6C@keescook>
 <874k0mqs5i.fsf@oldenburg.str.redhat.com>
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On Wed, Jun 15, 2022 at 09:53:29AM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Kees Cook:
> 
> > On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 11:07:22PM -0700, Andrei Vagin wrote:
> >> Right now, a new process can't be forked in another time namespace
> >> if it shares mm with its parent. It is prohibited, because each time
> >> namespace has its own vvar page that is mapped into a process address
> >> space.
> >> 
> >> When a process calls exec, it gets a new mm and so it could be "legal"
> >> to switch time namespace in that case. This was not implemented and
> >> now if we want to do this, we need to add another clone flag to not
> >> break backward compatibility.
> >> 
> >> We don't have any user requests to switch times on exec except the
> >> vfork+exec combination, so there is no reason to add a new clone flag.
> >> As for vfork+exec, this should be safe to allow switching timens with
> >> the current clone flag. Right now, vfork (CLONE_VFORK | CLONE_VM) fails
> >> if a child is forked into another time namespace. With this change,
> >> vfork creates a new process in parent's timens, and the following exec
> >> does the actual switch to the target time namespace.
> >
> > This seems like a very special case. None of the other namespaces do
> > this, do they?
> 
> I think this started with CLONE_NEWPID, which had a similar delayed
> effect with unshare: it happens only after fork, not for the current
> process image.  I think it's just a limitation of the unshare interface.
> Some of the effects simply have to be delayed due to their nature.

I tried to give more context in another mail wrt to time namespaces
specifically.

For pid namespaces one problem would be that it could end up confusing a
process about its own pid. This was a more serious problem when the pid
cache was still active in glibc; but fwiw systemd still has a pid cache
afair.

Christian