Re: [PATCH] Make /proc/net a symlink on /proc/self/net (v2)

Pavel Emelyanov [off-list ref] writes:

Current /proc/net is done with so called "shadows", but current
implementation is broken and has little chances to get fixed.

The problem is that dentries subtree of /proc/net directory has
fancy revalidation rules to make processes living in different
net namespaces see different entries in /proc/net subtree, but
currently, tasks see in the /proc/net subdir the contents of any
other namespace, depending on who opened the file first.

The proposed fix is to turn /proc/net into a symlink, which points
to /proc/self/net, which in turn shows what previously was in
/proc/net - the network-related info, from the net namespace the
appropriate task lives in.

# ls -l /proc/net
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 8 Mar  5 15:17 /proc/net -> self/net

In other words - this behaves like /proc/mounts, but unlike
"mounts", "net" is not a file, but a directory.

Fixed a task_struct leak in get_proc_task_net, pointed out by Paul.

Signed-off-by: Pavel Emelyanov <redacted>

Before I forget.

As a future patch we need to implement a d_revalidate rule for
/proc/<pid>/task/net that will notice we have unshared a network
namespace and flush all cached dentries for the old network namespace.

Since unsharing happens rarely if at all this d_revalidate should
be relatively cheap, and since the change is real and for everyone
it will not suffer from the inconsistencies that plagued us when
working with d_revalidate on /proc/net.

Eric