netdev - Re: [PATCH v7 0/9] coredump: add coredump socket

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Message-ID: <20250515-ameisen-abmarsch-37b698f99847@brauner>
Date: Thu, 15 May 2025 11:17:03 +0200
From: Christian Brauner <brauner@...nel.org>
To: linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, Jann Horn <jannh@...gle.com>, 
	Daniel Borkmann <daniel@...earbox.net>, Kuniyuki Iwashima <kuniyu@...zon.com>
Cc: Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>, Oleg Nesterov <oleg@...hat.com>, 
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>, Alexander Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>, 
	Daan De Meyer <daan.j.demeyer@...il.com>, David Rheinsberg <david@...dahead.eu>, 
	Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>, Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>, 
	Lennart Poettering <lennart@...ttering.net>, Luca Boccassi <bluca@...ian.org>, Mike Yuan <me@...dnzj.com>, 
	Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>, Simon Horman <horms@...nel.org>, 
	Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek@...waw.pl>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, netdev@...r.kernel.org, 
	linux-security-module@...r.kernel.org, Alexander Mikhalitsyn <alexander@...alicyn.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v7 0/9] coredump: add coredump socket

On Thu, May 15, 2025 at 12:03:33AM +0200, Christian Brauner wrote:
> Coredumping currently supports two modes:
> 
> (1) Dumping directly into a file somewhere on the filesystem.
> (2) Dumping into a pipe connected to a usermode helper process
>     spawned as a child of the system_unbound_wq or kthreadd.
> 
> For simplicity I'm mostly ignoring (1). There's probably still some
> users of (1) out there but processing coredumps in this way can be
> considered adventurous especially in the face of set*id binaries.
> 
> The most common option should be (2) by now. It works by allowing
> userspace to put a string into /proc/sys/kernel/core_pattern like:
> 
>         |/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-coredump %P %u %g %s %t %c %h
> 
> The "|" at the beginning indicates to the kernel that a pipe must be
> used. The path following the pipe indicator is a path to a binary that
> will be spawned as a usermode helper process. Any additional parameters
> pass information about the task that is generating the coredump to the
> binary that processes the coredump.
> 
> In the example core_pattern shown above systemd-coredump is spawned as a
> usermode helper. There's various conceptual consequences of this
> (non-exhaustive list):
> 
> - systemd-coredump is spawned with file descriptor number 0 (stdin)
>   connected to the read-end of the pipe. All other file descriptors are
>   closed. That specifically includes 1 (stdout) and 2 (stderr). This has
>   already caused bugs because userspace assumed that this cannot happen
>   (Whether or not this is a sane assumption is irrelevant.).
> 
> - systemd-coredump will be spawned as a child of system_unbound_wq. So
>   it is not a child of any userspace process and specifically not a
>   child of PID 1. It cannot be waited upon and is in a weird hybrid
>   upcall which are difficult for userspace to control correctly.
> 
> - systemd-coredump is spawned with full kernel privileges. This
>   necessitates all kinds of weird privilege dropping excercises in
>   userspace to make this safe.
> 
> - A new usermode helper has to be spawned for each crashing process.
> 
> This series adds a new mode:
> 
> (3) Dumping into an abstract AF_UNIX socket.

s/abstract//
Forgot to remove that. Fixed in-tree.