The kernel has no concept of capabilities with respect to inodes; inodes
exist independently of namespaces. For example, inode_capable(inode,
CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE) would be nonsense.
This patch changes inode_capable to check for uid and gid mappings and
renames it to capable_wrt_inode_uidgid, which should make it more
obvious what it does.
Fixes CVE-2014-4014.
Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Currently notify_change directly updates i_version for size updates,
which not only is counter to how all other fields are updated through
struct iattr, but also breaks XFS, which need inode updates to happen
under its own lock, and synchronized to the structure that gets written
to the log.
Remove the update in the common code, and it to btrfs and ext4,
XFS already does a proper updaste internally and currently gets a
double update with the existing code.
IMHO this is 3.13 and -stable material and should go in through the XFS
tree.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Andreas Dilger <adilger@dilger.ca>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Reviewed-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>
NFSv4 uses leases to guarantee that clients can cache metadata as well
as data.
Cc: Mikulas Patocka <mikulas@artax.karlin.mff.cuni.cz>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@canonical.com>
Cc: Dustin Kirkland <dustin.kirkland@gazzang.com>
Acked-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: J. Bruce Fields <bfields@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
- Allow chown if CAP_CHOWN is present in the current user namespace
and the uid of the inode maps into the current user namespace, and
the destination uid or gid maps into the current user namespace.
- Allow perserving setgid when changing an inode if CAP_FSETID is
present in the current user namespace and the owner of the file has
a mapping into the current user namespace.
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Changing an inode's metadata may result in our not needing to appraise
the file. In such cases, we must remove 'security.ima'.
Changelog v1:
- use ima_inode_post_setattr() stub function, if IMA_APPRAISE not configured
Signed-off-by: Mimi Zohar <zohar@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Acked-by: Dmitry Kasatkin <dmitry.kasatkin@intel.com>
When a file is truncated with truncate()/ftruncate() and then closed,
iversion is not updated. This patch uses ATTR_SIZE flag as an indication
to increment iversion.
Mimi said:
On fput(), i_version is used to detect and flag files that have changed
and need to be re-measured in the IMA measurement policy. When a file
is truncated with truncate()/ftruncate() and then closed, i_version is
not updated. As a result, although the file has changed, it will not be
re-measured and added to the IMA measurement list on subsequent access.
Signed-off-by: Dmitry Kasatkin <dmitry.kasatkin@intel.com>
Acked-by: Mimi Zohar <zohar@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Cc: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
For files only using THIS_MODULE and/or EXPORT_SYMBOL, map
them onto including export.h -- or if the file isn't even
using those, then just delete the include. Fix up any implicit
include dependencies that were being masked by module.h along
the way.
Signed-off-by: Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@windriver.com>
Let filesystems handle waiting for direct I/O requests themselves instead
of doing it beforehand. This means filesystem-specific locks to prevent
new dio referenes from appearing can be held. This is important to allow
generalizing i_dio_count to non-DIO_LOCKING filesystems.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
i_alloc_sem is a rather special rw_semaphore. It's the last one that may
be released by a non-owner, and it's write side is always mirrored by
real exclusion. It's intended use it to wait for all pending direct I/O
requests to finish before starting a truncate.
Replace it with a hand-grown construct:
- exclusion for truncates is already guaranteed by i_mutex, so it can
simply fall way
- the reader side is replaced by an i_dio_count member in struct inode
that counts the number of pending direct I/O requests. Truncate can't
proceed as long as it's non-zero
- when i_dio_count reaches non-zero we wake up a pending truncate using
wake_up_bit on a new bit in i_flags
- new references to i_dio_count can't appear while we are waiting for
it to read zero because the direct I/O count always needs i_mutex
(or an equivalent like XFS's i_iolock) for starting a new operation.
This scheme is much simpler, and saves the space of a spinlock_t and a
struct list_head in struct inode (typically 160 bits on a non-debug 64-bit
system).
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Changing the inode's metadata may require the 'security.evm' extended
attribute to be re-calculated and updated.
Signed-off-by: Mimi Zohar <zohar@us.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Some recent benchmarking on btrfs showed that a major scaling bottleneck
on large systems on btrfs is currently the xattr lookup on every write.
Why xattr lookup on every write I hear you ask?
write wants to drop suid and security related xattrs that could set o
capabilities for executables. To do that it currently looks up
security.capability on EVERY write (even for non executables) to decide
whether to drop it or not.
In btrfs this causes an additional tree walk, hitting some per file system
locks and quite bad scalability. In a simple read workload on a 8S
system I saw over 90% CPU time in spinlocks related to that.
Chris Mason tells me this is also a problem in ext4, where it hits
the global mbcache lock.
This patch adds a simple per inode to avoid this problem. We only
do the lookup once per file and then if there is no xattr cache
the decision. All xattr changes clear the flag.
I also used the same flag to avoid the suid check, although
that one is pretty cheap.
A file system can also set this flag when it creates the inode,
if it has a cheap way to do so. This is done for some common file systems
in followon patches.
With this patch a major part of the lock contention disappears
for btrfs. Some testing on smaller systems didn't show significant
performance changes, but at least it helps the larger systems
and is generally more efficient.
v2: Rename is_sgid. add file system helper.
Cc: chris.mason@oracle.com
Cc: josef@redhat.com
Cc: viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk
Cc: agruen@linbit.com
Cc: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
And give it a kernel-doc comment.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: btrfs changed in linux-next]
Signed-off-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@free.fr>
Acked-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Make sure we check the truncate constraints early on in ->setattr by adding
those checks to inode_change_ok. Also clean up and document inode_change_ok
to make this obvious.
As a fallout we don't have to call inode_newsize_ok from simple_setsize and
simplify it down to a truncate_setsize which doesn't return an error. This
simplifies a lot of setattr implementations and means we use truncate_setsize
almost everywhere. Get rid of fat_setsize now that it's trivial and mark
ext2_setsize static to make the calling convention obvious.
Keep the inode_newsize_ok in vmtruncate for now as all callers need an
audit for its removal anyway.
Note: setattr code in ecryptfs doesn't call inode_change_ok at all and
needs a deeper audit, but that is left for later.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Replace inode_setattr with opencoded variants of it in all callers. This
moves the remaining call to vmtruncate into the filesystem methods where it
can be replaced with the proper truncate sequence.
In a few cases it was obvious that we would never end up calling vmtruncate
so it was left out in the opencoded variant:
spufs: explicitly checks for ATTR_SIZE earlier
btrfs,hugetlbfs,logfs,dlmfs: explicitly clears ATTR_SIZE earlier
ufs: contains an opencoded simple_seattr + truncate that sets the filesize just above
In addition to that ncpfs called inode_setattr with handcrafted iattrs,
which allowed to trim down the opencoded variant.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
With the new truncate sequence every filesystem that wants to support file
size changes on disk needs to implement its own ->setattr. So instead
of calling inode_setattr which supports size changes call into a simple
method that doesn't support this. simple_setattr is almost what we
want except that it does not mark the inode dirty after changes. Given
that marking the inode dirty is a no-op for the simple in-memory filesystems
that use simple_setattr currently just add the mark_inode_dirty call.
Also add a WARN_ON for the presence of a truncate method to simple_setattr
to catch new instances of it during the transition period.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Despite its name it's now a generic implementation of ->setattr, but
rather a helper to copy attributes from a struct iattr to the inode.
Rename it to setattr_copy to reflect this fact.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Introduce a new truncate calling sequence into fs/mm subsystems. Rather than
setattr > vmtruncate > truncate, have filesystems call their truncate sequence
from ->setattr if filesystem specific operations are required. vmtruncate is
deprecated, and truncate_pagecache and inode_newsize_ok helpers introduced
previously should be used.
simple_setattr is introduced for simple in-ram filesystems to implement
the new truncate sequence. Eventually all filesystems should be converted
to implement a setattr, and the default code in notify_change should go
away.
simple_setsize is also introduced to perform just the ATTR_SIZE portion
of simple_setattr (ie. changing i_size and trimming pagecache).
To implement the new truncate sequence:
- filesystem specific manipulations (eg freeing blocks) must be done in
the setattr method rather than ->truncate.
- vmtruncate can not be used by core code to trim blocks past i_size in
the event of write failure after allocation, so this must be performed
in the fs code.
- convert usage of helpers block_write_begin, nobh_write_begin,
cont_write_begin, and *blockdev_direct_IO* to use _newtrunc postfixed
variants. These avoid calling vmtruncate to trim blocks (see previous).
- inode_setattr should not be used. generic_setattr is a new function
to be used to copy simple attributes into the generic inode.
- make use of the better opportunity to handle errors with the new sequence.
Big problem with the previous calling sequence: the filesystem is not called
until i_size has already changed. This means it is not allowed to fail the
call, and also it does not know what the previous i_size was. Also, generic
code calling vmtruncate to truncate allocated blocks in case of error had
no good way to return a meaningful error (or, for example, atomically handle
block deallocation).
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Acked-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Make sure compiler won't do weird things with limits. E.g. fetching them
twice may return 2 different values after writable limits are implemented.
I.e. either use rlimit helpers added in commit 3e10e716ab ("resource:
add helpers for fetching rlimits") or ACCESS_ONCE if not applicable.
Signed-off-by: Jiri Slaby <jslaby@suse.cz>
Cc: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Currently notify_change calls vfs_dq_transfer directly. This means
we tie the quota code into the VFS. Get rid of that and make the
filesystem responsible for the transfer. Most filesystems already
do this, only ufs and udf need the code added, and for jfs it needs to
be enabled unconditionally instead of only when ACLs are enabled.
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Introduce new truncate helpers truncate_pagecache and inode_newsize_ok.
vmtruncate is also consolidated from mm/memory.c and mm/nommu.c and
into mm/truncate.c.
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Use lowercase names of quota functions instead of old uppercase ones.
Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
CC: Alexander Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Wrap access to task credentials so that they can be separated more easily from
the task_struct during the introduction of COW creds.
Change most current->(|e|s|fs)[ug]id to current_(|e|s|fs)[ug]id().
Change some task->e?[ug]id to task_e?[ug]id(). In some places it makes more
sense to use RCU directly rather than a convenient wrapper; these will be
addressed by later patches.
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Call security_inode_setattr() consistetly before inode_change_ok().
It doesn't make sense to try to "optimize" the i_op->setattr == NULL
case, as most filesystem do define their own setattr function.
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Move the immutable and append-only checks from chmod, chown and utimes
into notify_change(). Checks for immutable and append-only files are
always performed by the VFS and not by the filesystem (see
permission() and may_...() in namei.c), so these belong in
notify_change(), and not in inode_change_ok().
This should be completely equivalent.
CC: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
CC: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Add a new ia_valid flag: ATTR_TIMES_SET, to handle the
UTIMES_OMIT/UTIMES_NOW and UTIMES_NOW/UTIMES_OMIT cases. In these
cases neither ATTR_MTIME_SET nor ATTR_ATIME_SET is in the flags, yet
the POSIX draft specifies that permission checking is performed the
same way as if one or both of the times was explicitly set to a
timestamp.
See the path "vfs: utimensat(): fix error checking for
{UTIME_NOW,UTIME_OMIT} case" by Michael Kerrisk for the patch
introducing this behavior.
This is a cleanup, as well as allowing filesystems (NFS/fuse/...) to
perform their own permission checking instead of the default.
CC: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
CC: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Miklos Szeredi <mszeredi@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
When an unprivileged process attempts to modify a file that has the setuid or
setgid bits set, the VFS will attempt to clear these bits. The VFS will set
the ATTR_KILL_SUID or ATTR_KILL_SGID bits in the ia_valid mask, and then call
notify_change to clear these bits and set the mode accordingly.
With a networked filesystem (NFS and CIFS in particular but likely others),
the client machine or process may not have credentials that allow for setting
the mode. In some situations, this can lead to file corruption, an operation
failing outright because the setattr fails, or to races that lead to a mode
change being reverted.
In this situation, we'd like to just leave the handling of this to the server
and ignore these bits. The problem is that by the time the setattr op is
called, the VFS has already reinterpreted the ATTR_KILL_* bits into a mode
change. The setattr operation has no way to know its intent.
The following patch fixes this by making notify_change no longer clear the
ATTR_KILL_SUID and ATTR_KILL_SGID bits in the ia_valid before handing it off
to the setattr inode op. setattr can then check for the presence of these
bits, and if they're set it can assume that the mode change was only for the
purposes of clearing these bits.
This means that we now have an implicit assumption that notify_change is never
called with ATTR_MODE and either ATTR_KILL_S*ID bit set. Nothing currently
enforces that, so this patch also adds a BUG() if that occurs.
Signed-off-by: Jeff Layton <jlayton@redhat.com>
Cc: Michael Halcrow <mhalcrow@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Jeff Mahoney <jeffm@suse.com>
Cc: "Vladimir V. Saveliev" <vs@namesys.com>
Cc: Josef 'Jeff' Sipek <jsipek@cs.sunysb.edu>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Cc: Steven French <sfrench@us.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Implement file posix capabilities. This allows programs to be given a
subset of root's powers regardless of who runs them, without having to use
setuid and giving the binary all of root's powers.
This version works with Kaigai Kohei's userspace tools, found at
http://www.kaigai.gr.jp/index.php. For more information on how to use this
patch, Chris Friedhoff has posted a nice page at
http://www.friedhoff.org/fscaps.html.
Changelog:
Nov 27:
Incorporate fixes from Andrew Morton
(security-introduce-file-caps-tweaks and
security-introduce-file-caps-warning-fix)
Fix Kconfig dependency.
Fix change signaling behavior when file caps are not compiled in.
Nov 13:
Integrate comments from Alexey: Remove CONFIG_ ifdef from
capability.h, and use %zd for printing a size_t.
Nov 13:
Fix endianness warnings by sparse as suggested by Alexey
Dobriyan.
Nov 09:
Address warnings of unused variables at cap_bprm_set_security
when file capabilities are disabled, and simultaneously clean
up the code a little, by pulling the new code into a helper
function.
Nov 08:
For pointers to required userspace tools and how to use
them, see http://www.friedhoff.org/fscaps.html.
Nov 07:
Fix the calculation of the highest bit checked in
check_cap_sanity().
Nov 07:
Allow file caps to be enabled without CONFIG_SECURITY, since
capabilities are the default.
Hook cap_task_setscheduler when !CONFIG_SECURITY.
Move capable(TASK_KILL) to end of cap_task_kill to reduce
audit messages.
Nov 05:
Add secondary calls in selinux/hooks.c to task_setioprio and
task_setscheduler so that selinux and capabilities with file
cap support can be stacked.
Sep 05:
As Seth Arnold points out, uid checks are out of place
for capability code.
Sep 01:
Define task_setscheduler, task_setioprio, cap_task_kill, and
task_setnice to make sure a user cannot affect a process in which
they called a program with some fscaps.
One remaining question is the note under task_setscheduler: are we
ok with CAP_SYS_NICE being sufficient to confine a process to a
cpuset?
It is a semantic change, as without fsccaps, attach_task doesn't
allow CAP_SYS_NICE to override the uid equivalence check. But since
it uses security_task_setscheduler, which elsewhere is used where
CAP_SYS_NICE can be used to override the uid equivalence check,
fixing it might be tough.
task_setscheduler
note: this also controls cpuset:attach_task. Are we ok with
CAP_SYS_NICE being used to confine to a cpuset?
task_setioprio
task_setnice
sys_setpriority uses this (through set_one_prio) for another
process. Need same checks as setrlimit
Aug 21:
Updated secureexec implementation to reflect the fact that
euid and uid might be the same and nonzero, but the process
might still have elevated caps.
Aug 15:
Handle endianness of xattrs.
Enforce capability version match between kernel and disk.
Enforce that no bits beyond the known max capability are
set, else return -EPERM.
With this extra processing, it may be worth reconsidering
doing all the work at bprm_set_security rather than
d_instantiate.
Aug 10:
Always call getxattr at bprm_set_security, rather than
caching it at d_instantiate.
[morgan@kernel.org: file-caps clean up for linux/capability.h]
[bunk@kernel.org: unexport cap_inode_killpriv]
Signed-off-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Stephen Smalley <sds@tycho.nsa.gov>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Cc: Chris Wright <chrisw@sous-sol.org>
Cc: Andrew Morgan <morgan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morgan <morgan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Introduce is_owner_or_cap() macro in fs.h, and convert over relevant
users to it. This is done because we want to avoid bugs in the future
where we check for only effective fsuid of the current task against a
file's owning uid, without simultaneously checking for CAP_FOWNER as
well, thus violating its semantics.
[ XFS uses special macros and structures, and in general looked ...
untouchable, so we leave it alone -- but it has been looked over. ]
The (current->fsuid != inode->i_uid) check in generic_permission() and
exec_permission_lite() is left alone, because those operations are
covered by CAP_DAC_OVERRIDE and CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH. Similarly operations
falling under the purview of CAP_CHOWN and CAP_LEASE are also left alone.
Signed-off-by: Satyam Sharma <ssatyam@cse.iitk.ac.in>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge@hallyn.com>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Remove includes of <linux/smp_lock.h> where it is not used/needed.
Suggested by Al Viro.
Builds cleanly on x86_64, i386, alpha, ia64, powerpc, sparc,
sparc64, and arm (all 59 defconfigs).
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
fs: Use <linux/capability.h> where capable() is used.
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Acked-by: Tim Schmielau <tim@physik3.uni-rostock.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
SUS requires that when truncating a file to the size that it currently
is:
truncate and ftruncate should NOT modify ctime or mtime
O_TRUNC SHOULD modify ctime and mtime.
Currently mtime and ctime are always modified on most local
filesystems (side effect of ->truncate) or never modified (on NFS).
With this patch:
ATTR_CTIME|ATTR_MTIME are sent with ATTR_SIZE precisely when
an update of these times is required whether size changes or not
(via a new argument to do_truncate). This allows NFS to do
the right thing for O_TRUNC.
inode_setattr nolonger forces ATTR_MTIME|ATTR_CTIME when the ATTR_SIZE
sets the size to it's current value. This allows local filesystems
to do the right thing for f?truncate.
Also, the logic in inode_setattr is changed a bit so there are two return
points. One returns the error from vmtruncate if it failed, the other
returns 0 (there can be no other failure).
Finally, if vmtruncate succeeds, and ATTR_SIZE is the only change
requested, we now fall-through and mark_inode_dirty. If a filesystem did
not have a ->truncate function, then vmtruncate will have changed i_size,
without marking the inode as 'dirty', and I think this is wrong.
Signed-off-by: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
inotify is intended to correct the deficiencies of dnotify, particularly
its inability to scale and its terrible user interface:
* dnotify requires the opening of one fd per each directory
that you intend to watch. This quickly results in too many
open files and pins removable media, preventing unmount.
* dnotify is directory-based. You only learn about changes to
directories. Sure, a change to a file in a directory affects
the directory, but you are then forced to keep a cache of
stat structures.
* dnotify's interface to user-space is awful. Signals?
inotify provides a more usable, simple, powerful solution to file change
notification:
* inotify's interface is a system call that returns a fd, not SIGIO.
You get a single fd, which is select()-able.
* inotify has an event that says "the filesystem that the item
you were watching is on was unmounted."
* inotify can watch directories or files.
Inotify is currently used by Beagle (a desktop search infrastructure),
Gamin (a FAM replacement), and other projects.
See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt.
Signed-off-by: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
Cc: John McCutchan <ttb@tentacle.dhs.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
