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[PATCH]: Revert 2.6.36 chroot ttyname regression

December 05th, 2010 - 07:00 pm ET by ebiederm | Report spam
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As of 2.6.36 ttyname does not work in a chroot. It has already
been reported that screen breaks, and for me this breaks an automated
distribution testsuite, that I need to preserve the ability to run
the existing binaries on for several more years. glibc 2.11.3 which
has a fix for this is not an option.

The root cause of this breakage is:
commit 8df9d1a4142311c084ffeeacb67cd34d190eff74
Author: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Date: Tue Aug 10 11:41:41 2010 +0200

vfs: show unreachable paths in getcwd and proc

Prepend "(unreachable)" to path strings if the path is not reachable
from the current root.

Two places updated are
- the return string from getcwd()
- and symlinks under /proc/$PID.

Other uses of d_path() are left unchanged (we know that some old
software crashes if /proc/mounts is changed).

Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>


So remove the nice sounding, but ultimately ill advised change to how
/proc/fd symlinks work.

Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>



Index: linux-2.6.37-rc4.x86_64/fs/proc/base.c
linux-2.6.37-rc4.x86_64.orig/fs/proc/base.c
+++ linux-2.6.37-rc4.x86_64/fs/proc/base.c
@@ -1574,7 +1574,7 @@ static int do_proc_readlink(struct path
if (!tmp)
return -ENOMEM;

- pathname = d_path_with_unreachable(path, tmp, PAGE_SIZE);
+ pathname = d_path(path, tmp, PAGE_SIZE);
len = PTR_ERR(pathname);
if (IS_ERR(pathname))
goto out;
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#1 Miklos Szeredi
December 06th, 2010 - 05:10 am ET | Report spam
On Sun, 2010-12-05 at 15:51 -0800, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
As of 2.6.36 ttyname does not work in a chroot. It has already
been reported that screen breaks, and for me this breaks an automated
distribution testsuite, that I need to preserve the ability to run
the existing binaries on for several more years. glibc 2.11.3 which
has a fix for this is not an option.

The root cause of this breakage is:
commit 8df9d1a4142311c084ffeeacb67cd34d190eff74
Author: Miklos Szeredi
Date: Tue Aug 10 11:41:41 2010 +0200

vfs: show unreachable paths in getcwd and proc

Prepend "(unreachable)" to path strings if the path is not reachable
from the current root.

Two places updated are
- the return string from getcwd()
- and symlinks under /proc/$PID.

Other uses of d_path() are left unchanged (we know that some old
software crashes if /proc/mounts is changed).

Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi
Signed-off-by: Al Viro


So remove the nice sounding, but ultimately ill advised change to how
/proc/fd symlinks work.



I didn't anticipate this problem, and reverting is probably the right
thing to do here. But the fact remains: proc symlinks remain a badly
defined and, as a consequence, badly used interface.

Userspace assumes that these symlinks, when doing readlink on them, will
yield a valid absolute path that points to the same file (as did ttyname
in previous glibc's). This is a false assumption because the file may
not be reachable due to it being unlinked, under a chroot, in a
different mount namespace, or on a detached mount, etc...

If the file is unlinked, we'll have "/path/to/old/name (deleted)" which
is an especially bad since it cannot be distinguished from an existing
file called "name (deleted)".

Do we want to do anything with this or should we just leave it broken?

One way to fix the "(unreachable)" thing without breaking ttyname() is
to do a forward pass on unreachable paths, checking whether the exact
same file is indeed reachable under the current root. Not prepending
"(unreachable)" is defensible in this case because, even though the
dentry/vfsmount pair for the open file is unreachable from the current
root, the file itself *is* reachable under the same name.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Miklos


Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman"



Index: linux-2.6.37-rc4.x86_64/fs/proc/base.c
> linux-2.6.37-rc4.x86_64.orig/fs/proc/base.c
+++ linux-2.6.37-rc4.x86_64/fs/proc/base.c
@@ -1574,7 +1574,7 @@ static int do_proc_readlink(struct path
if (!tmp)
return -ENOMEM;

- pathname = d_path_with_unreachable(path, tmp, PAGE_SIZE);
+ pathname = d_path(path, tmp, PAGE_SIZE);
len = PTR_ERR(pathname);
if (IS_ERR(pathname))
goto out;




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