linux/include/uapi
Christian Brauner 820a185896 fcntl: add F_CREATED_QUERY
Systemd has a helper called openat_report_new() that returns whether a
file was created anew or it already existed before for cases where
O_CREAT has to be used without O_EXCL (cf. [1]). That apparently isn't
something that's specific to systemd but it's where I noticed it.

The current logic is that it first attempts to open the file without
O_CREAT | O_EXCL and if it gets ENOENT the helper tries again with both
flags. If that succeeds all is well. If it now reports EEXIST it
retries.

That works fairly well but some corner cases make this more involved. If
this operates on a dangling symlink the first openat() without O_CREAT |
O_EXCL will return ENOENT but the second openat() with O_CREAT | O_EXCL
will fail with EEXIST. The reason is that openat() without O_CREAT |
O_EXCL follows the symlink while O_CREAT | O_EXCL doesn't for security
reasons. So it's not something we can really change unless we add an
explicit opt-in via O_FOLLOW which seems really ugly.

The caller could try and use fanotify() to register to listen for
creation events in the directory before calling openat(). The caller
could then compare the returned tid to its own tid to ensure that even
in threaded environments it actually created the file. That might work
but is a lot of work for something that should be fairly simple and I'm
uncertain about it's reliability.

The caller could use a bpf lsm hook to hook into security_file_open() to
figure out whether they created the file. That also seems a bit wild.

So let's add F_CREATED_QUERY which allows the caller to check whether
they actually did create the file. That has caveats of course but I
don't think they are problematic:

* In multi-threaded environments a thread can only be sure that it did
  create the file if it calls openat() with O_CREAT. In other words,
  it's obviously not enough to just go through it's fdtable and check
  these fds because another thread could've created the file.

* If there's any codepaths where an openat() with O_CREAT would yield
  the same struct file as that of another thread it would obviously
  cause wrong results. I'm not aware of any such codepaths from openat()
  itself. Imho, that would be a bug.

* Related to the previous point, calling the new fcntl() on files created
  and opened via special-purpose system calls or ioctl()s would cause
  wrong results only if the affected subsystem a) raises FMODE_CREATED
  and b) may return the same struct file for two different calls. I'm
  not seeing anything outside of regular VFS code that raises
  FMODE_CREATED.

  There is code for b) in e.g., the drm layer where the same struct file
  is resurfaced but again FMODE_CREATED isn't used and it would be very
  misleading if it did.

Link: 11d5e2b5fb/src/basic/fs-util.c (L1078) [1]
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240724-work-fcntl-v1-1-e8153a2f1991@kernel.org
Reviewed-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner <brauner@kernel.org>
2024-08-19 13:44:34 +02:00
..
asm-generic uretprobe: change syscall number, again 2024-08-02 15:18:49 +02:00
drm drm next for 6.11-rc1: 2024-07-18 09:34:02 -07:00
linux fcntl: add F_CREATED_QUERY 2024-08-19 13:44:34 +02:00
misc Revert "misc: fastrpc: Restrict untrusted app to attach to privileged PD" 2024-08-15 16:59:14 +02:00
mtd ubi: fastmap: Add control in 'UBI_IOCATT' ioctl to reserve PEBs for filling pools 2023-10-28 23:16:00 +02:00
rdma RDMA/core: Introduce "name_assign_type" for an IB device 2024-07-04 07:59:53 +03:00
regulator uapi: regulator: Fix typo 2024-01-04 13:22:24 +00:00
scsi scsi: mpi3mr: Add ioctl support for HDB 2024-06-26 23:30:09 -04:00
sound ALSA: seq: Add tempo base unit for MIDI2 Set Tempo messages 2024-07-06 09:38:27 +02:00
video
xen xen/gntalloc: Replace UAPI 1-element array 2024-02-13 09:06:48 +01:00
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