netdev - Re: [PATCH net-next V2 0/2] send process status in SCM

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Message-Id: <20140701.163153.30109595101601494.davem@davemloft.net>
Date:	Tue, 01 Jul 2014 16:31:53 -0700 (PDT)
From:	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
To:	p.wilczek@...sung.com
Cc:	netdev@...r.kernel.org, kyungmin.park@...sung.com,
	juho80.son@...sung.com, b.zolnierkie@...sung.com,
	jkaluza@...hat.com, luto@...capital.net
Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next V2 0/2] send process status in SCM_PROCINFO

From: Piotr Wilczek <p.wilczek@...sung.com>
Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 14:55:52 +0200

> Server-like processes in many cases need credentials and other
> metadata of the peer, to decide if the calling process is allowed to
> request a specific action, or the server just wants to log away this
> type of information for auditing tasks.
> 
> The current practice to retrieve such process metadata is to look that
> information up in procfs with the $PID received over SCM_CREDENTIALS.
> This is sufficient for long-running tasks, but introduces a race which
> cannot be worked around for short-living processes; the calling
> process and all the information in /proc/$PID/ is gone before the
> receiver of the socket message can look it up.
> 
> Changes introduced in this patchset can also increase performance
> of such server-like processes, because current way of opening and
> parsing /proc/$PID/* files is much more expensive than receiving these
> metadata using SCM.
> 
> As an example, this patch set improves systemd-journald performance
> by about 20%. Generally, performance improvement depends on how heavily
> procfs is read the calling process.
> http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.systemd.devel/19467
> 
> This patch set is split in two patches:
> - the first adds library to retrive process information without
> dependency on procfs.
> - the second introduces a new SCM type called SCM_PROCINFO to optionally
> allow the direct attaching of process status to SCM.

I really would like someone smarter than me to review the security
implications et al. of these changes before I apply them.

Andy?  Maybe you have an opinion?

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