linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/24] kernel: add a netlink interface to get information about processes (v2)

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Message-ID: <1583220.Fp5vNj67Du@wuerfel>
Date:	Fri, 04 Dec 2015 00:43:29 +0100
From:	Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>
To:	Andy Lutomirski <luto@...capital.net>
Cc:	Andrew Vagin <avagin@...tuozzo.com>,
	Andrey Vagin <avagin@...nvz.org>,
	David Ahern <dsahern@...il.com>,
	"linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux API <linux-api@...r.kernel.org>,
	Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Cyrill Gorcunov <gorcunov@...nvz.org>,
	Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@...allels.com>,
	Roger Luethi <rl@...lgate.ch>,
	Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@...nel.org>,
	Pavel Odintsov <pavel.odintsov@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/24] kernel: add a netlink interface to get information about processes (v2)

On Thursday 03 December 2015 15:20:30 Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > * Netlink is designed for such type of workloads. It allows to expand
> >   the interface and save backward compatibility. It allows to generates
> >   packets with a different set of parameters.
> > * If we use a file descriptor, we can create it and decrease
> >   capabilities of the current process. It's a good feature which will be
> >   unavailable if we decide to create a system call.
> 
> If this is actually a real goal and it matters, then I'd suggest doing
> it right.  Make a way to create an fd that represents a pidns and,
> specifically, the right to query non-secret properties of the
> processes in the pidns.

My first thought about doing an interface here was to create a virtual
file system that can be queried rather than using netlink, but then I
realized that the idea was to avoid procfs ;-)

More seriously, maybe the answer is to have a transaction file in
procfs itself. Procfs already knows about namespaces, so adding
a /proc/task-diag file as the entry point into the kernel could
get that out of the way.

The simple_transaction infrastructure that we have is limited to
a little under a page for the total data size, but something similar
could be used.

	Arnd
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