Re: [RFC] Null Namespaces

[Al Viro]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2026 at 11:41:07PM -0400, John Ericson wrote:

> The current working directory, roughly, is *just* some global state
> holding a directory file descriptor.

So's the descriptor table; what's the difference?

> But I don't want that global state.

Don't use it, then... out of curiosity, does that extend to stdout et.al.?

> If I am writing my userland program (that is not a shell), I would not
> create the global variable. I do not appreciate the fact that the kernel
> foists that state upon me whether I like it or not.

<wry> Kernel will have to live without your appreciation, I suppose. </wry>

> Now obviously we cannot have a giant breaking change removing the notion
> of a current working directory altogether. But we can allow individual
> processes which don't want it to opt out, and that is what nulling out
> these fields (and updating the path resolution code to cope with that)
> allows.
> 
> There is no loss of expressive power doing this, because one can (and
> should!) just use the `*at` and file descriptors. But there is, however,
> the imposition of discipline.

So supply a library of your own and try to convince people to use it
instead of libc.  You'll have to anyway, seeing that a large and
hard-to-predict part of libc will be non-functional.  Which syscalls
are used by your library is entirely up to you.

Would that kind of thing added kernel-side assist the development of such
library?  Maybe, but I wouldn't bet too much on that - if you start from
scratch, you can trivially verify that you don't even attempt given
set of syscalls and if you use libc as a starting point, you get to
debug all the failure exits you've added...

> The programmer (or coding agent) is
> encouraged to do everything with file descriptors rather than path
> concatenations etc., because they need to use `*at` anyways, and then
> voilà, without browbeating anyone in security seminars or code review, a
> bunch of TOCTOU issues disappear simply because doing the right thing is
> now the path of least resistance.

I'm sorry, but the path of least resistance is picking a snippet from google
that will implement open(), etc., on top of your setup and using it.
_Especially_ if coding agents are going to be involved, precisely because
they'll do a convincing simulation of human duhveloper's behaviour, i.e.
"cut'n'paste it from the net".