Re: [PATCH 2/4] pid: add pidfd_open()

[Daniel Colascione]

On Thu, Mar 28, 2019 at 3:38 AM Christian Brauner <christian@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > All that said, thanks for the work on this once again. My intention is
> > just that we don't end up with an API that could have been done better
> > and be cleaner to use for potential users in the coming years.
>
> Thanks for your input on all of this. I still don't find multiplexers in
> the style of seccomp()/fsconfig()/keyctl() to be a problem since they
> deal with a specific task. They are very much different from ioctl()s in
> that regard. But since Joel, you, and Daniel found the pidctl() approach
> not very nice I dropped it. The interface needs to be satisfactory for
> all of us especially since Android and other system managers will be the
> main consumers.

Thanks.

> So let's split this into pidfd_open(pid_t pid, unsigned int flags) which
> allows to cleanly get pidfds independent procfs and do the translation
> to procpidfds in an ioctl() as we've discussed in prior threads. This

I sustain my objection to adding an ioctl. Compared to a system call,
an ioctl has a more rigid interface, greater susceptibility to
programmer error (due to the same ioctl control code potentially doing
different things for different file types), longer path length, and
more awkward filtering/monitoring/auditing/tracing. We've discussed
this issue at length before, and I thought we all agreed to use system
calls, not ioctl, for core kernel functionality. So why is an ioctl
suddenly back on the table? The way I see it, an ioctl has no
advantages except for 1) conserving system call numbers, which are not
scarce, and 2) avoiding the system call number coordination problem
(and the coordination problem isn't a factor for core kernel code). I
don't understand everyone's reluctance to add new system calls. What
am I missing? Why would we give up all the advantages that a system
call gives us?

I also don't understand Andy's argument on the other thread that an
ioctl is okay if it's an "operation on an FD" --- *most* system calls
are operations on FDs. We don't have an ioctl for sendmsg(2) and it's
an "operation on an FD".