Re: clone3: allow creation of time namespace with offset

[Andrei Vagin]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 11:29:55AM +0100, Christian Brauner wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 09:16:43AM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 19, 2020 at 9:11 AM Adrian Reber <areber@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > > With Arnd's idea of only using nanoseconds, timens_offset would then
> > > contain something like this:
> > >
> > > struct timens_offset {
> > >         __aligned_s64 monotonic_offset_ns;
> > >         __aligned_s64 boottime_offset_ns;
> > > };
> > >
> > > I kind of prefer adding boottime and monotonic directly to struct clone_args
> > >
> > >         __aligned_u64 tls;
> > >         __aligned_u64 set_tid;
> > >         __aligned_u64 set_tid_size;
> > > +       __aligned_s64 monotonic_offset_ns;
> > > +       __aligned_s64 boottime_offset_ns;
> > >  };
> > 
> > I would also prefer the second approach using two 64-bit integers
> > instead of a pointer, as it keeps the interface simpler to implement
> > and simpler to interpret by other tools.
> 
> Why I don't like has two reasons. There's the scenario where we have
> added new extensions after the new boottime member and then we introduce
> another offset. Then you'd be looking at:
> 
> __aligned_u64 tls;
> __aligned_u64 set_tid;
> __aligned_u64 set_tid_size;
> + __aligned_s64 monotonic_offset_ns;
> + __aligned_s64 boottime_offset_ns;
> __aligned_s64 something_1
> __aligned_s64 anything_2
> + __aligned_s64 sometime_offset_ns
> 
> which bothers me just by looking at it. That's in addition to adding two
> new members to the struct when most people will never set CLONE_NEWTIME.
> We'll also likely have more features in the future that will want to
> pass down more info than we want to directly expose in struct
> clone_args, e.g. for a long time I have been thinking about adding a
> struct for CLONE_NEWUSER that allows you to specify the id mappings you
> want the new user namespace to get. We surely don't want to force all
> new info into the uppermost struct. So I'm not convinced we should here.

I think here we can start thinking about a netlink-like interface.

struct clone_args {
	....
	u64	attrs_offset;
}

struct clone_attr {
	u16 cla_len;
	u16 cla_type;
}


....

int parse_clone_attributes(struct kernel_clone_args *kargs, struct clone_args *args, size_t args_size)
{
	u64 off = args->attrs_offset;

	while (off < size) {
		struct clone_attr *attr;

		if (off + sizeof(struct clone_attr) uargs_size)
			return -EINVAL;

		attr = (struct clone_attr *) ((void *)args + off);

		if (attr->cla_type > CLONE_ATTR_TYPE_MAX)
			return -ENOSYS;

		kargs->attrs[attr->cla_type] = CLONE_ATTR_DATA(attr);
		off += CLONE_ATTR_LEN(attr);
	}

	return 0;
}

This interface doesn't suffer from problems what you enumerated before:

* clone_args contains only fields which are often used.
* per-feature attributes can be extended in a future without breaking
  backward compatibility.
* unused features don't affect clone3 argument size.
* seccomp-friendly (I am not 100% sure about this)