Re: RFC: named anonymous vmas

[John Stultz]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Colin Cross <ccross@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 4:48 AM, Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 12:47:29PM -0700, Alex Elsayed wrote:
>>> Couldn't this be done by having a root-only tmpfs, and having a userspace
>>> component that creates per-app directories with restrictive permissions on
>>> startup/app install? Then each app creates files in its own directory, and
>>> can pass the fds around.
>
> If each app gets its own writable directory that's not really
> different than a world writable tmpfs.  It requires something that
> watches for apps to exit for any reason and cleans up their
> directories, and it requires each app to come up with an unused name
> when it wants to create a file, and the kernel can give you both very
> cleanly.

Though, I believe having a daemon that has exclusive access to tmpfs,
and creates, unlinks and passes the fd to the requesting application
would provide a userspace only implementation of the second feature
requirement ("without having a world-writable tmpfs that untrusted
apps could fill with files").  Though I'm not sure what the
proc/<pid>/maps naming would look like on the unlinked file, so it
might not solve the third naming issue.

thanks
-john
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