On Mon, 29 Sep 2014 10:49:15 +0200 Yann Droneaud [off-list ref] wrote:

According to commit 80af258867648 ('fanotify: groups can specify
their f_flags for new fd'), file descriptors created as part of
file access notification events inherit flags from the
event_f_flags argument passed to syscall fanotify_init(2).

So while it is legal for userspace to call fanotify_init() with
O_CLOEXEC as part of its second argument, O_CLOEXEC is currently
silently ignored.

Indeed event_f_flags are only given to dentry_open(), which only
seems to care about O_ACCMODE and O_PATH in do_dentry_open(),
O_DIRECT in open_check_o_direct() and O_LARGEFILE in
generic_file_open().

But it seems logical to set close-on-exec flag on the file
descriptor if userspace is allowed to request it with O_CLOEXEC.

In fact, according to some lookup on http://codesearch.debian.net/
and various search engine, there's already some userspace code
requesting it:

- in systemd's readahead[2]:

    fanotify_fd = fanotify_init(FAN_CLOEXEC|FAN_NONBLOCK, O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE|O_CLOEXEC|O_NOATIME);

- in clsync[3]:

    #define FANOTIFY_EVFLAGS (O_LARGEFILE|O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC)

    int fanotify_d = fanotify_init(FANOTIFY_FLAGS, FANOTIFY_EVFLAGS);

- in examples [4] from "Filesystem monitoring in the Linux
  kernel" article[5] by Aleksander Morgado:

    if ((fanotify_fd = fanotify_init (FAN_CLOEXEC,
                                      O_RDONLY | O_CLOEXEC | O_LARGEFILE)) < 0)

So we have a number of apps which are setting O_CLOEXEC, but it doesn't
actually work.  With this change it *will* work, so the behaviour of
those apps might change, possibly breaking them?