Re: [PATCH 2/2] ovl: allow distributed fs as lower layer

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Miklos Szeredi <miklos@szeredi.hu> writes:

> On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 3:02 AM, Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com> wrote:
>> A nasty corner case to be aware of (and I think this is part of what Al
>> was warning about).  /proc/sys/net is different depending upon which
>> current->nsproxy->net_ns.
>
> Ah,  I'm beginning to grasp what's going on there: mulitple dentries
> with the same name but belonging to different namespaces,
> ->d_compare() being used to select the right one.  Is that it?

Yes.  The whole sysctl_is_seen magic.

I am not proud of it, and I keep thinking I should create
/proc/<pid>/sys/...  making /proc/sys a symlink to /proc/<pid>/sys/

so that case could go away.  Although at this point tomoyo or apparmor
probably has rules that would make that impossible (despite no
applications actually caring). *sigh*

> Overlayfs checks for d_compare() on the root of the lower and upper
> trees, but here it only set on a subdirectory of proc, not on every
> dentry.  So overlayfs should be careful and check for
> DCACHE_OP_COMPARE | DCACHE_OP_HASH and reject going down such a
> dentry.

That sound about right.

Eric