Re: [PATCHv10 man-pages 5/5] execveat.2: initial man page for execveat(2)

[Rich Felker]

On Fri, Jan 09, 2015 at 07:17:41PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Rich Felker <dalias@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> > I'm not proposing code because I'm a libc developer not a kernel
> > developer. I know what's needed for userspace to provide a conforming
> > fexecve to applications, not how to implement that on the kernel side,
> > although I'm trying to provide constructive ideas. The hostility is
> > really not necessary.
> 
> Conforming to what?
> 
> The open group fexecve says nothing about requiring a file descriptor
> passed to fexecve to have O_CLOEXEC.

It doesn't require it but it allows it, and in multithreaded programs
that might run child processes (or library code that might be used in
such situations), O_CLOEXEC is mandatory everywhere to avoid fd leaks.

> Further looking at open group specification of exec it seems to indicate
> the preferred way to handle this is for the kernel to return O_NOEXEC
> and then libc gets to figure out how to run the shell script.  Is that
> the kind of ``conforming'' implementation you are looking for?

This is a complex issue, and does not apply to native #! support
(which is a supported executable format and thus not ENOEXEC) but
rather standard POSIX shell scripts (which don't have a #! line at
all). In this case the behavior of fexecve is perhaps under-specified.
However, in cases where execve would succeed (without causing
ENOEXEC), I think it's at least undesirable, if not non-conforming,
for fexecve to fail.

Should we request clarification from the Austin Group?

Rich
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