linux-hardening - Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/8] Introduce mseal() syscall

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Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2023 10:44:16 -0700
From: Jeff Xu <jeffxu@...omium.org>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc: Pedro Falcato <pedro.falcato@...il.com>, Jeff Xu <jeffxu@...gle.com>, 
	Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org>, akpm@...ux-foundation.org, keescook@...omium.org, 
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	dave.hansen@...el.com, luto@...nel.org, linux-hardening@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/8] Introduce mseal() syscall

On Thu, Oct 19, 2023 at 4:06 PM Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 19 Oct 2023 at 15:47, Pedro Falcato <pedro.falcato@...il.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > For mprotect()/mmap(), is Linux implementation limited by POSIX ?
> >
> > No. POSIX works merely as a baseline that UNIX systems aim towards.
> > You can (and very frequently do) extend POSIX interfaces (in fact,
> > it's how most of POSIX was written, through sheer
> > "design-by-committee" on a bunch of UNIX systems' extensions).
>
> We can in extreme circumstances actually go further than that, and not
> only extend on POSIX requirements, but actively even violate them.
>
> It does need a very good reason, though, but it has happened when
> POSIX requirements were simply actively wrong.
>
> For example, at one point POSIX required
>
>      int accept(int s, struct sockaddr *addr, size_t *addrlen);
>
> which was simply completely wrong. It's utter shite, and didn't
> actually match any reality.
>
> The 'addrlen' parameter is 'int *', and POSIX suddenly trying to make
> it "size_t" was completely unacceptable.
>
> So we ignored it, told POSIX people that they were full of sh*t, and
> they eventually fixed it in the next version (by introducing a
> "socklen_t" that had better be the same as "int").
>
> So POSIX can simply be wrong.
>
> Also, if it turns out that we had some ABI that wasn't
> POSIX-compatible, the whole "don't break user space" will take
> precedence over any POSIX concerns, and we will not "fix" our system
> call if people already use our old semantics.
>
> So in that case, we generally end up with a new system call (or new
> flags) instead.
>
> Or sometimes it just is such a small detail that nobody cares - POSIX
> also has a notion of documenting areas of non-conformance, and people
> who really care end up having notions like "conformance vs _strict_
> conformance".
>
>                  Linus
>

Thanks Linus for clarifying the guidelines on POSIX in Linux.

-Jeff