Re: [patch 5/5] VFS: allow filesystem to override mknod capability checks

From: Christoph Hellwig
Date: Fri Sep 21 2007 - 10:33:52 EST


On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 03:18:33PM +0200, Miklos Szeredi wrote:
> > That's something that shouldn't be solved in the filesystem, but rather
> > through exact semantics of unprivilegued mounts. Given that an
> > unprivilegued implies ignoring the device files we can easily allow
> > users to create them, because they're nothing special anymore.
>
> Exacly. And we already have an API for that: mknod(2). It would be
> quite stupid to introduce _another_ API to do the same. It would mean
> that all the tools, like mknod(8) would not work with the new API.
>
> Or am I misunderstanding your suggestion?

Yes :)

My suggestions is:

- mknod for unprivilegued user is allowed in the following case

(1) mount point is mounted with MNT_NODEV
(2) mount point is owner by the user doing mknod

- and maybe

(3) we have a special mount option to allow it if we don't want
to allow it for normal unprivilegued mounts for some reason

which implies we need to get in unprivilegued mounts first, but we'll
have to do that anyway.
-
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