Re: [RFC v2] ptrace, pidfd: add pidfd_ptrace syscall

[Christian Brauner]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 08:39:35AM +0200, Hagen Paul Pfeifer wrote:
> * Linus Torvalds | 2020-04-27 21:28:14 [-0700]:
> 
> >> I hate to say this, but Iâm not convinced that asking the gdb folks is
> >> the right approach. GDB has an ancient architecture and is
> >> *incredibly* buggy. Iâm sure ptrace is somewhere on the pain point
> >> list, but I suspect itâs utterly dwarfed by everything else.
> >
> >You may be right. However, if gdbn isn't going to use it, then I
> >seriously don't think it's worth changing much.
> >
> >It might be worth looking at people who don't use ptrace() for
> >debugging, but for "incidental" reasons. IOW sandboxing, tracing,
> >things like that.
> >
> >Maybe those people want things that are simpler and don't actually
> >need the kinds of hard serialization that ptrace() wants.
> >
> >I'd rather add a few really simple things that might not be a full
> >complement of operations for a debugger, but exactly because they
> >aren't a full debugger, maybe they are things that we can tell are
> >obviously secure and simple?
> 
> Okay, to sum up the the whole discussion: we go forward with Jann's proposal
> by simple adding PTRACE_ATTACH_PIDFD and friends. This is the minimal invasive
> solution and the risk of an potenial security problem is almost not present[TM].
> 
> Changing the whole ptrace API is a different beast. I rather believe that I
> see Linus Linux successor rather than a ptrace successor.
> 
> I am fine with PTRACE_ATTACH_PIDFD!

If this is enough for you use-case then we should make due with my
initial suggestion, yes. I'd be fine with adding this variant.

I initially thought that we'd likely would need to support a few more
but I don't think we want to actually; there's a bunch of crazy stuff in
there.

Christian