Thread (20 messages) 20 messages, 4 authors, 2025-09-15

Re: [PATCH v4 2/4] procfs: add "pidns" mount option

From: Randy Dunlap <hidden>
Date: 2025-08-06 00:19:52
Also in: linux-doc, linux-fsdevel, linux-kselftest, lkml

Hi,

On 8/4/25 10:45 PM, Aleksa Sarai wrote:
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
Since the introduction of pid namespaces, their interaction with procfs
has been entirely implicit in ways that require a lot of dancing around
by programs that need to construct sandboxes with different PID
namespaces.

Being able to explicitly specify the pid namespace to use when
constructing a procfs super block will allow programs to no longer need
to fork off a process which does then does unshare(2) / setns(2) and
forks again in order to construct a procfs in a pidns.

So, provide a "pidns" mount option which allows such users to just
explicitly state which pid namespace they want that procfs instance to
use. This interface can be used with fsconfig(2) either with a file
descriptor or a path:

  fsconfig(procfd, FSCONFIG_SET_FD, "pidns", NULL, nsfd);
  fsconfig(procfd, FSCONFIG_SET_STRING, "pidns", "/proc/self/ns/pid", 0);

or with classic mount(2) / mount(8):

  // mount -t proc -o pidns=/proc/self/ns/pid proc /tmp/proc
  mount("proc", "/tmp/proc", "proc", MS_..., "pidns=/proc/self/ns/pid");

As this new API is effectively shorthand for setns(2) followed by
mount(2), the permission model for this mirrors pidns_install() to avoid
opening up new attack surfaces by loosening the existing permission
model.

In order to avoid having to RCU-protect all users of proc_pid_ns() (to
avoid UAFs), attempting to reconfigure an existing procfs instance's pid
namespace will error out with -EBUSY. Creating new procfs instances is
quite cheap, so this should not be an impediment to most users, and lets
us avoid a lot of churn in fs/proc/* for a feature that it seems
unlikely userspace would use.

Signed-off-by: Aleksa Sarai <redacted>
---
 Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst |  8 ++++
 fs/proc/root.c                     | 98 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
 2 files changed, 100 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)
diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
index 5236cb52e357..5a157dadea0b 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/proc.rst
@@ -2360,6 +2360,7 @@ The following mount options are supported:
 	hidepid=	Set /proc/<pid>/ access mode.
 	gid=		Set the group authorized to learn processes information.
 	subset=		Show only the specified subset of procfs.
+	pidns=		Specify a the namespace used by this procfs.
			drop ^^ a
quoted hunk ↗ jump to hunk
 	=========	========================================================
 
 hidepid=off or hidepid=0 means classic mode - everybody may access all
@@ -2392,6 +2393,13 @@ information about processes information, just add identd to this group.
 subset=pid hides all top level files and directories in the procfs that
 are not related to tasks.
 
+pidns= specifies a pid namespace (either as a string path to something like
+`/proc/$pid/ns/pid`, or a file descriptor when using `FSCONFIG_SET_FD`) that
+will be used by the procfs instance when translating pids. By default, procfs
+will use the calling process's active pid namespace. Note that the pid
+namespace of an existing procfs instance cannot be modified (attempting to do
+so will give an `-EBUSY` error).
+
 Chapter 5: Filesystem behavior
 ==============================
 
-- 
~Randy
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