linux-kernel - Re: fanotify as syscalls

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Message-Id: <200909190000.43556.agruen@suse.de>
Date:	Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:43 +0200
From:	Andreas Gruenbacher <agruen@...e.de>
To:	Eric Paris <eparis@...hat.com>
Cc:	Jamie Lokier <jamie@...reable.org>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Evgeniy Polyakov <zbr@...emap.net>,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org,
	netdev@...r.kernel.org, viro@...iv.linux.org.uk,
	alan@...ux.intel.com, hch@...radead.org
Subject: Re: fanotify as syscalls

On Friday, 18 September 2009 22:52:08 Eric Paris wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 22:07 +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
> > From my point of view, "global" events make no sense, and fanotify
> > listeners should register which directories they are interested in (e.g.,
> > include "/", exclude "/proc"). This takes care of chroots and namespaces
> > as well.
>
> While I completely agree that most users don't want global events, the
> antimalware vendors who today, unprotect and hack the syscall table on
> their unsuspecting customer's machines to intercept every read, write,
> open, close, mmap, etc syscall want EXACTLY that.

I understand that "global" is what those guys get today for lack of a 
reasonable mechanism, but it's not what anybody can ge given by fanotify: it 
conflicts with filesystem namespaces.

Consider running several "virtual machines" in separate namespaces on the same 
kernel. With "global" you are forced to run the same global fanotify 
listeners everywhere; with per-mount-point listeners, you can choose 
between "global" and something more fine-grained by identifying which 
vfsmounts you are interested in. (Filesystem namespaces correspond to 
vfsmount hierarchies.)

> [...] You still have to exclude /proc and /sys and everything else.

Those are mount points, and so convenient to handle with a per-mount-point 
mechanism. No additional kernel code needed.

> [...] Still though, this sounds like an issue for the f_type and f_fsid
> exclusion syscall I say I'm still not settled on.

Those are also obsolete with a per-mount-point mechanism.

Thanks,
Andreas
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