Re: [patch 1/2] fork_connector: add a fork connector

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Evgeniy Polyakov wrote:
On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 10:26:19 -0800
Ram <[email protected]> wrote:


On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 23:07, Guillaume Thouvenin wrote:

On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 12:52 -0800, Ram wrote:

If a bunch of applications are listening for fork events, your patch allows any application to turn off the fork event notification? Is this the right behavior?

Yes it is. The main management is done by application so, if several
applications are listening for fork events you need to choose which one
will turn off the fork connector.
I want to keep this turn on/off mechanism simple but if it's needed I
can manage the variable "cn_fork_enable" as a counter. Thus the callback
could be something like:

static void cn_fork_callback(void *data)
{
int start; struct cn_msg *msg = (struct cn_msg *)data;

 if (cn_already_initialized && (msg->len == sizeof(cn_fork_enable))) {
   memcpy(&start, msg->data, sizeof(cn_fork_enable));
   if (start)
     cn_fork_enable++;
   else
     cn_fork_enable > 0 ? cn_fork_enable-- : 0;
 }
}

I think a better way is:

Providing a different connector channel called the administrator channel which can be used only by a super-user, and gives you
  the ability to switch on or off any connector channel including the
  fork-connector channel.


Only super-user can bind netlink socket to multicast group.


  For lack of better term I am using the word 'channel' to mean
  something that carries events of particular type through the
  connector-infrastructure.


I still do not see why it is needed.
Super-user can run ip command and turn network interface off
not waiting while apache or named exits or unbind.

You can turn off a network interface and turn it back on without
closing a network application and it will continue to work.


In theory I can create some kind of userspace registration mechanism,
when userspace application reports it's pid to the connector, and then it sends data to the specified pids, but does not allow controlling from userspace.
But I really do not think it is a good idea to permit
non-priviledged userspace processes to know about deep
kernel internals through connector's messages.

I see this issue less a case of bad guys vs. good guys. I see it
as various components doing system related work, but there is
no mechanism of knowing who is on who is off by today's patch. A
service listening to the fork connector can request to turn off
cn_fork_enable on exit and inadquately affect other services/daemons
listening to the same connector. It is not acceptable in my opinion.

The idea of implementing fork connector enabling/disabling was so
that the kernel does not waste time writing to the sockets if no
application listening. If implementing such a feature costs
more than it saves, maybe the fork connector should simply always
send?

Thanks,
- jay




RP




What do you think about this implementation?
Guillaume




	Evgeniy Polyakov

Only failure makes us experts. -- Theo de Raadt

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