Re: [PATCH] mm/mincore: allow for making sys_mincore() privileged

On Wed, 16 Jan 2019, Linus Torvalds wrote:

quoted

"Being owner or has cap" (whichever cap) is probably OK. On the other 
hand, writeability check makes more sense in general - could we 
somehow check if the user has write access to the file instead of 
checking if it currently is opened read-write?

That's likely the best option. We could say "is it open for write, or
_could_ we open it for writing?"

It's a slightly annoying special case, and I'd have preferred to avoid
it, but it doesn't sound *compilcated*.

I'm on the road, but I did send out this:

    https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wif_9nvNHJiyxHzJ80_WUb0P7CXNBvXkjZz-r1u0ozp7g@mail.gmail.com/ (local)

originally. The "let's try to only do the mmap residency" was the
optimistic "maybe we can just get rid of this complexity entirely"
version..

Anybody willing to test the above patch instead? And replace the

   || capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN)

check with something like

   || inode_permission(inode, MAY_WRITE) == 0

instead?

(This is obviously after you've reverted the "only check mmap
residency" patch..)

So that seems to deal with mincore() in a reasonable way indeed.

It doesn't unfortunately really solve the preadv2(RWF_NOWAIT), nor does it 
provide any good answer what to do about it, does it?

Thanks,

-- 
Jiri Kosina
SUSE Labs