On Thu, 2021-08-19 at 10:33 -0400, J. Bruce Fields wrote:

On Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 08:56:52AM -0500, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

quoted

bfields@fieldses.org (J. Bruce Fields) writes:

quoted

On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 05:49:19PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

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I’ll bite.  How about we attack this in the opposite direction: remove
the deny write mechanism entirely.

For what it's worth, Windows has open flags that allow denying read or
write opens.  They also made their way into the NFSv4 protocol, but
knfsd enforces them only against other NFSv4 clients.  Last I checked,
Samba attempted to emulate them using flock (and there's a comment to
that effect on the flock syscall in fs/locks.c).  I don't know what Wine
does.

Pavel Shilovsky posted flags adding O_DENY* flags years ago:

	https://lwn.net/Articles/581005/

I keep thinking I should look back at those some day but will probably
never get to it.

I've no idea how Windows applications use them, though I'm told it's
common.

I don't know in any detail.  I just have this memory of not being able
to open or do anything with a file on windows while any application has
it open.

We limit mandatory locks to filesystems that have the proper mount flag
and files that are sgid but are not executable.  Reusing that limit we
could probably allow such a behavior in Linux without causing chaos.

I'm pretty confused about how we're using the term "mandatory locking".

The locks you're thinking of are basically ordinary posix byte-range
locks which we attempt to enforce as mandatory under certain conditions
(e.g. in fs/read_write.c:rw_verify_area).  That means we have to check
them on ordinary reads and writes, which is a pain in the butt.  (And we
don't manage to do it correctly--the code just checks for the existence
of a conflicting lock before performing IO, ignoring the obvious
time-of-check/time-of-use race.)

Yeah, the locks we're talking about are the locks described in:

    Documentation/filesystems/mandatory-locking.rst

They've always been racy. You have to mount the fs with '-o mand' and
set a special mode on the file (setgid bit set, with group execute bit
cleared). It's a crazypants interface.

This has nothing to do with Windows share locks which from what I
understand are whole-file locks that are only enforced against opens.

Yep. Those are different.

Confusingly, there is also LOCK_MAND|LOCK_READ|LOCK_WRITE for flock(),
which are purported to be for emulating Windows share modes. They aren't
really mandatory though.

--b.

quoted

Without being very strict about which files can participate I can just
imagine someone hiding their presence by not allowing other applications
the ability to write to utmp or a log file.

In the windows world where everything evolved with those kinds of
restrictions it is probably fine (although super annoying).

Eric

-- 
Jeff Layton [off-list ref]