kernel/linux.git/fs/proc, branch v6.18.37

mm: introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make visible in /proc/$pid/smaps

2026-06-27T10:06:48+00:00

commit 5dba5cc2e0ffa76f2f6c8922a04469dc9602c396 upstream. Patch series "introduce VM_MAYBE_GUARD and make it sticky", v4. Currently, guard regions are not visible to users except through /proc/$pid/pagemap, with no explicit visibility at the VMA level. This makes the feature less useful, as it isn't entirely apparent which VMAs may have these entries present, especially when performing actions which walk through memory regions such as those performed by CRIU. This series addresses this issue by introducing the VM_MAYBE_GUARD flag which fulfils this role, updating the smaps logic to display an entry for these. The semantics of this flag are that a guard region MAY be present if set (we cannot be sure, as we can't efficiently track whether an MADV_GUARD_REMOVE finally removes all the guard regions in a VMA) - but if not set the VMA definitely does NOT have any guard regions present. It's problematic to establish this flag without further action, because that means that VMAs with guard regions in them become non-mergeable with adjacent VMAs for no especially good reason. To work around this, this series also introduces the concept of 'sticky' VMA flags - that is flags which: a. if set in one VMA and not in another still permit those VMAs to be merged (if otherwise compatible). b. When they are merged, the resultant VMA must have the flag set. The VMA logic is updated to propagate these flags correctly. Additionally, VM_MAYBE_GUARD being an explicit VMA flag allows us to solve an issue with file-backed guard regions - previously these established an anon_vma object for file-backed mappings solely to have vma_needs_copy() correctly propagate guard region mappings to child processes. We introduce a new flag alias VM_COPY_ON_FORK (which currently only specifies VM_MAYBE_GUARD) and update vma_needs_copy() to check explicitly for this flag and to copy page tables if it is present, which resolves this issue. Additionally, we add the ability for allow-listed VMA flags to be atomically writable with only mmap/VMA read locks held. The only flag we allow so far is VM_MAYBE_GUARD, which we carefully ensure does not cause any races by being allowed to do so. This allows us to maintain guard region installation as a read-locked operation and not endure the overhead of obtaining a write lock here. Finally we introduce extensive VMA userland tests to assert that the sticky VMA logic behaves correctly as well as guard region self tests to assert that smaps visibility is correctly implemented. This patch (of 9): Currently, if a user needs to determine if guard regions are present in a range, they have to scan all VMAs (or have knowledge of which ones might have guard regions). Since commit 8e2f2aeb8b48 ("fs/proc/task_mmu: add guard region bit to pagemap") and the related commit a516403787e0 ("fs/proc: extend the PAGEMAP_SCAN ioctl to report guard regions"), users can use either /proc/$pid/pagemap or the PAGEMAP_SCAN functionality to perform this operation at a virtual address level. This is not ideal, and it gives no visibility at a /proc/$pid/smaps level that guard regions exist in ranges. This patch remedies the situation by establishing a new VMA flag, VM_MAYBE_GUARD, to indicate that a VMA may contain guard regions (it is uncertain because we cannot reasonably determine whether a MADV_GUARD_REMOVE call has removed all of the guard regions in a VMA, and additionally VMAs may change across merge/split). We utilise 0x800 for this flag which makes it available to 32-bit architectures also, a flag that was previously used by VM_DENYWRITE, which was removed in commit 8d0920bde5eb ("mm: remove VM_DENYWRITE") and hasn't bee reused yet. We also update the smaps logic and documentation to identify these VMAs. Another major use of this functionality is that we can use it to identify that we ought to copy page tables on fork. We do not actually implement usage of this flag in mm/madvise.c yet as we need to allow some VMA flags to be applied atomically under mmap/VMA read lock in order to avoid the need to acquire a write lock for this purpose. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/cover.1763460113.git.ljs@kernel.org Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/cf8ef821eba29b6c5b5e138fffe95d6dcabdedb9.1763460113.git.ljs@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Stoakes Reviewed-by: Pedro Falcato Reviewed-by: Vlastimil Babka Acked-by: David Hildenbrand (Red Hat) Reviewed-by: Lance Yang Cc: Andrei Vagin Cc: Baolin Wang Cc: Barry Song Cc: Dev Jain Cc: Jann Horn Cc: Jonathan Corbet Cc: Liam Howlett Cc: "Masami Hiramatsu (Google)" Cc: Mathieu Desnoyers Cc: Michal Hocko Cc: Mike Rapoport Cc: Nico Pache Cc: Ryan Roberts Cc: Steven Rostedt Cc: Suren Baghdasaryan Cc: Zi Yan Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Ahmed Elaidy Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

procfs: fix possible double mmput() in do_procmap_query()

2026-03-04T12:21:29+00:00

[ Upstream commit 61dc9f776705d6db6847c101b98fa4f0e9eb6fa3 ] When user provides incorrectly sized buffer for build ID for PROCMAP_QUERY we return with -ENAMETOOLONG error. After recent changes this condition happens later, after we unlocked mmap_lock/per-VMA lock and did mmput(), so original goto out is now wrong and will double-mmput() mm_struct. Fix by jumping further to clean up only vm_file and name_buf. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260210192738.3041609-1-andrii@kernel.org Fixes: b5cbacd7f86f ("procfs: avoid fetching build ID while holding VMA lock") Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko Reported-by: Ruikai Peng Reported-by: Thomas Gleixner Tested-by: Thomas Gleixner Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt Reported-by: syzbot+237b5b985b78c1da9600@syzkaller.appspotmail.com Cc: Ruikai Peng Closes: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/CAFD3drOJANTZPuyiqMdqpiRwOKnHwv5QgMNZghCDr-WxdiHvMg@mail.gmail.com Closes: https://lore.kernel.org/all/698aaf3c.050a0220.3b3015.0088.GAE@google.com/T/#u Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

proc: Fix pointer error dereference

2026-03-04T12:20:45+00:00

[ Upstream commit f6a495484a27150fb85f943e1a7464da88c2a797 ] The function try_lookup_noperm() can return an error pointer. Add check for error pointer. Detected by Smatch: fs/proc/base.c:2148 proc_fill_cache() error: 'child' dereferencing possible ERR_PTR() Fixes: 1df98b8bbcca ("proc_fill_cache(): clean up, get rid of pointless find_inode_number() use") Signed-off-by: Ethan Tidmore Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260219221001.1117135-1-ethantidmore06@gmail.com Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

procfs: fix missing RCU protection when reading real_parent in do_task_stat()

2026-02-26T22:59:22+00:00

[ Upstream commit 76149d53502cf17ef3ae454ff384551236fba867 ] When reading /proc/[pid]/stat, do_task_stat() accesses task->real_parent without proper RCU protection, which leads to: cpu 0 cpu 1 ----- ----- do_task_stat var = task->real_parent release_task call_rcu(delayed_put_task_struct) task_tgid_nr_ns(var) rcu_read_lock <--- Too late to protect task->real_parent! task_pid_ptr <--- UAF! rcu_read_unlock This patch uses task_ppid_nr_ns() instead of task_tgid_nr_ns() to add proper RCU protection for accessing task->real_parent. Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260128083007.3173016-1-alexjlzheng@tencent.com Fixes: 06fffb1267c9 ("do_task_stat: don't take rcu_read_lock()") Signed-off-by: Jinliang Zheng Acked-by: Oleg Nesterov Cc: David Hildenbrand Cc: Ingo Molnar Cc: Lorenzo Stoakes Cc: Mateusz Guzik Cc: ruippan Cc: Usama Arif Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin

procfs: avoid fetching build ID while holding VMA lock

2026-02-11T12:41:41+00:00

commit b5cbacd7f86f4f62b8813688c8e73be94e8e1951 upstream. Fix PROCMAP_QUERY to fetch optional build ID only after dropping mmap_lock or per-VMA lock, whichever was used to lock VMA under question, to avoid deadlock reported by syzbot: -> #1 (&mm->mmap_lock){++++}-{4:4}: __might_fault+0xed/0x170 _copy_to_iter+0x118/0x1720 copy_page_to_iter+0x12d/0x1e0 filemap_read+0x720/0x10a0 blkdev_read_iter+0x2b5/0x4e0 vfs_read+0x7f4/0xae0 ksys_read+0x12a/0x250 do_syscall_64+0xcb/0xf80 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x77/0x7f -> #0 (&sb->s_type->i_mutex_key#8){++++}-{4:4}: __lock_acquire+0x1509/0x26d0 lock_acquire+0x185/0x340 down_read+0x98/0x490 blkdev_read_iter+0x2a7/0x4e0 __kernel_read+0x39a/0xa90 freader_fetch+0x1d5/0xa80 __build_id_parse.isra.0+0xea/0x6a0 do_procmap_query+0xd75/0x1050 procfs_procmap_ioctl+0x7a/0xb0 __x64_sys_ioctl+0x18e/0x210 do_syscall_64+0xcb/0xf80 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x77/0x7f other info that might help us debug this: Possible unsafe locking scenario: CPU0 CPU1 ---- ---- rlock(&mm->mmap_lock); lock(&sb->s_type->i_mutex_key#8); lock(&mm->mmap_lock); rlock(&sb->s_type->i_mutex_key#8); *** DEADLOCK *** This seems to be exacerbated (as we haven't seen these syzbot reports before that) by the recent: 777a8560fd29 ("lib/buildid: use __kernel_read() for sleepable context") To make this safe, we need to grab file refcount while VMA is still locked, but other than that everything is pretty straightforward. Internal build_id_parse() API assumes VMA is passed, but it only needs the underlying file reference, so just add another variant build_id_parse_file() that expects file passed directly. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix up kerneldoc] Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20260129215340.3742283-1-andrii@kernel.org Fixes: ed5d583a88a9 ("fs/procfs: implement efficient VMA querying API for /proc//maps") Signed-off-by: Andrii Nakryiko Reported-by: Reviewed-by: Suren Baghdasaryan Tested-by: Suren Baghdasaryan Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt Cc: Alexei Starovoitov Cc: Daniel Borkmann Cc: Eduard Zingerman Cc: Hao Luo Cc: Jiri Olsa Cc: John Fastabend Cc: KP Singh Cc: Martin KaFai Lau Cc: Song Liu Cc: Stanislav Fomichev Cc: Yonghong Song Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

fs/proc: fix uaf in proc_readdir_de()

2025-11-10T05:19:43+00:00

Pde is erased from subdir rbtree through rb_erase(), but not set the node to EMPTY, which may result in uaf access. We should use RB_CLEAR_NODE() set the erased node to EMPTY, then pde_subdir_next() will return NULL to avoid uaf access. We found an uaf issue while using stress-ng testing, need to run testcase getdent and tun in the same time. The steps of the issue is as follows: 1) use getdent to traverse dir /proc/pid/net/dev_snmp6/, and current pde is tun3; 2) in the [time windows] unregister netdevice tun3 and tun2, and erase them from rbtree. erase tun3 first, and then erase tun2. the pde(tun2) will be released to slab; 3) continue to getdent process, then pde_subdir_next() will return pde(tun2) which is released, it will case uaf access. CPU 0 | CPU 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- traverse dir /proc/pid/net/dev_snmp6/ | unregister_netdevice(tun->dev) //tun3 tun2 sys_getdents64() | iterate_dir() | proc_readdir() | proc_readdir_de() | snmp6_unregister_dev() pde_get(de); | proc_remove() read_unlock(&proc_subdir_lock); | remove_proc_subtree() | write_lock(&proc_subdir_lock); [time window] | rb_erase(&root->subdir_node, &parent->subdir); | write_unlock(&proc_subdir_lock); read_lock(&proc_subdir_lock); | next = pde_subdir_next(de); | pde_put(de); | de = next; //UAF | rbtree of dev_snmp6 | pde(tun3) / \ NULL pde(tun2) Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251025024233.158363-1-albin_yang@163.com Signed-off-by: Wei Yang Cc: Al Viro Cc: Christian Brauner Cc: wangzijie Cc: Alexey Dobriyan Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton

Merge tag 'mm-nonmm-stable-2025-10-02-15-29' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm

2025-10-03T01:44:54+00:00

Pull non-MM updates from Andrew Morton: - "ida: Remove the ida_simple_xxx() API" from Christophe Jaillet completes the removal of this legacy IDR API - "panic: introduce panic status function family" from Jinchao Wang provides a number of cleanups to the panic code and its various helpers, which were rather ad-hoc and scattered all over the place - "tools/delaytop: implement real-time keyboard interaction support" from Fan Yu adds a few nice user-facing usability changes to the delaytop monitoring tool - "efi: Fix EFI boot with kexec handover (KHO)" from Evangelos Petrongonas fixes a panic which was happening with the combination of EFI and KHO - "Squashfs: performance improvement and a sanity check" from Phillip Lougher teaches squashfs's lseek() about SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE. A mere 150x speedup was measured for a well-chosen microbenchmark - plus another 50-odd singleton patches all over the place * tag 'mm-nonmm-stable-2025-10-02-15-29' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm: (75 commits) Squashfs: reject negative file sizes in squashfs_read_inode() kallsyms: use kmalloc_array() instead of kmalloc() MAINTAINERS: update Sibi Sankar's email address Squashfs: add SEEK_DATA/SEEK_HOLE support Squashfs: add additional inode sanity checking lib/genalloc: fix device leak in of_gen_pool_get() panic: remove CONFIG_PANIC_ON_OOPS_VALUE ocfs2: fix double free in user_cluster_connect() checkpatch: suppress strscpy warnings for userspace tools cramfs: fix incorrect physical page address calculation kernel: prevent prctl(PR_SET_PDEATHSIG) from racing with parent process exit Squashfs: fix uninit-value in squashfs_get_parent kho: only fill kimage if KHO is finalized ocfs2: avoid extra calls to strlen() after ocfs2_sprintf_system_inode_name() kernel/sys.c: fix the racy usage of task_lock(tsk->group_leader) in sys_prlimit64() paths sched/task.h: fix the wrong comment on task_lock() nesting with tasklist_lock coccinelle: platform_no_drv_owner: handle also built-in drivers coccinelle: of_table: handle SPI device ID tables lib/decompress: use designated initializers for struct compress_format efi: support booting with kexec handover (KHO) ...

Merge tag 'mm-stable-2025-10-01-19-00' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm

2025-10-03T01:18:33+00:00

Pull MM updates from Andrew Morton: - "mm, swap: improve cluster scan strategy" from Kairui Song improves performance and reduces the failure rate of swap cluster allocation - "support large align and nid in Rust allocators" from Vitaly Wool permits Rust allocators to set NUMA node and large alignment when perforning slub and vmalloc reallocs - "mm/damon/vaddr: support stat-purpose DAMOS" from Yueyang Pan extend DAMOS_STAT's handling of the DAMON operations sets for virtual address spaces for ops-level DAMOS filters - "execute PROCMAP_QUERY ioctl under per-vma lock" from Suren Baghdasaryan reduces mmap_lock contention during reads of /proc/pid/maps - "mm/mincore: minor clean up for swap cache checking" from Kairui Song performs some cleanup in the swap code - "mm: vm_normal_page*() improvements" from David Hildenbrand provides code cleanup in the pagemap code - "add persistent huge zero folio support" from Pankaj Raghav provides a block layer speedup by optionalls making the huge_zero_pagepersistent, instead of releasing it when its refcount falls to zero - "kho: fixes and cleanups" from Mike Rapoport adds a few touchups to the recently added Kexec Handover feature - "mm: make mm->flags a bitmap and 64-bit on all arches" from Lorenzo Stoakes turns mm_struct.flags into a bitmap. To end the constant struggle with space shortage on 32-bit conflicting with 64-bit's needs - "mm/swapfile.c and swap.h cleanup" from Chris Li cleans up some swap code - "selftests/mm: Fix false positives and skip unsupported tests" from Donet Tom fixes a few things in our selftests code - "prctl: extend PR_SET_THP_DISABLE to only provide THPs when advised" from David Hildenbrand "allows individual processes to opt-out of THP=always into THP=madvise, without affecting other workloads on the system". It's a long story - the [1/N] changelog spells out the considerations - "Add and use memdesc_flags_t" from Matthew Wilcox gets us started on the memdesc project. Please see https://kernelnewbies.org/MatthewWilcox/Memdescs and https://blogs.oracle.com/linux/post/introducing-memdesc - "Tiny optimization for large read operations" from Chi Zhiling improves the efficiency of the pagecache read path - "Better split_huge_page_test result check" from Zi Yan improves our folio splitting selftest code - "test that rmap behaves as expected" from Wei Yang adds some rmap selftests - "remove write_cache_pages()" from Christoph Hellwig removes that function and converts its two remaining callers - "selftests/mm: uffd-stress fixes" from Dev Jain fixes some UFFD selftests issues - "introduce kernel file mapped folios" from Boris Burkov introduces the concept of "kernel file pages". Using these permits btrfs to account its metadata pages to the root cgroup, rather than to the cgroups of random inappropriate tasks - "mm/pageblock: improve readability of some pageblock handling" from Wei Yang provides some readability improvements to the page allocator code - "mm/damon: support ARM32 with LPAE" from SeongJae Park teaches DAMON to understand arm32 highmem - "tools: testing: Use existing atomic.h for vma/maple tests" from Brendan Jackman performs some code cleanups and deduplication under tools/testing/ - "maple_tree: Fix testing for 32bit compiles" from Liam Howlett fixes a couple of 32-bit issues in tools/testing/radix-tree.c - "kasan: unify kasan_enabled() and remove arch-specific implementations" from Sabyrzhan Tasbolatov moves KASAN arch-specific initialization code into a common arch-neutral implementation - "mm: remove zpool" from Johannes Weiner removes zspool - an indirection layer which now only redirects to a single thing (zsmalloc) - "mm: task_stack: Stack handling cleanups" from Pasha Tatashin makes a couple of cleanups in the fork code - "mm: remove nth_page()" from David Hildenbrand makes rather a lot of adjustments at various nth_page() callsites, eventually permitting the removal of that undesirable helper function - "introduce kasan.write_only option in hw-tags" from Yeoreum Yun creates a KASAN read-only mode for ARM, using that architecture's memory tagging feature. It is felt that a read-only mode KASAN is suitable for use in production systems rather than debug-only - "mm: hugetlb: cleanup hugetlb folio allocation" from Kefeng Wang does some tidying in the hugetlb folio allocation code - "mm: establish const-correctness for pointer parameters" from Max Kellermann makes quite a number of the MM API functions more accurate about the constness of their arguments. This was getting in the way of subsystems (in this case CEPH) when they attempt to improving their own const/non-const accuracy - "Cleanup free_pages() misuse" from Vishal Moola fixes a number of code sites which were confused over when to use free_pages() vs __free_pages() - "Add Rust abstraction for Maple Trees" from Alice Ryhl makes the mapletree code accessible to Rust. Required by nouveau and by its forthcoming successor: the new Rust Nova driver - "selftests/mm: split_huge_page_test: split_pte_mapped_thp improvements" from David Hildenbrand adds a fix and some cleanups to the thp selftesting code - "mm, swap: introduce swap table as swap cache (phase I)" from Chris Li and Kairui Song is the first step along the path to implementing "swap tables" - a new approach to swap allocation and state tracking which is expected to yield speed and space improvements. This patchset itself yields a 5-20% performance benefit in some situations - "Some ptdesc cleanups" from Matthew Wilcox utilizes the new memdesc layer to clean up the ptdesc code a little - "Fix va_high_addr_switch.sh test failure" from Chunyu Hu fixes some issues in our 5-level pagetable selftesting code - "Minor fixes for memory allocation profiling" from Suren Baghdasaryan addresses a couple of minor issues in relatively new memory allocation profiling feature - "Small cleanups" from Matthew Wilcox has a few cleanups in preparation for more memdesc work - "mm/damon: add addr_unit for DAMON_LRU_SORT and DAMON_RECLAIM" from Quanmin Yan makes some changes to DAMON in furtherance of supporting arm highmem - "selftests/mm: Add -Wunreachable-code and fix warnings" from Muhammad Anjum adds that compiler check to selftests code and fixes the fallout, by removing dead code - "Improvements to Victim Process Thawing and OOM Reaper Traversal Order" from zhongjinji makes a number of improvements in the OOM killer: mainly thawing a more appropriate group of victim threads so they can release resources - "mm/damon: misc fixups and improvements for 6.18" from SeongJae Park is a bunch of small and unrelated fixups for DAMON - "mm/damon: define and use DAMON initialization check function" from SeongJae Park implement reliability and maintainability improvements to a recently-added bug fix - "mm/damon/stat: expose auto-tuned intervals and non-idle ages" from SeongJae Park provides additional transparency to userspace clients of the DAMON_STAT information - "Expand scope of khugepaged anonymous collapse" from Dev Jain removes some constraints on khubepaged's collapsing of anon VMAs. It also increases the success rate of MADV_COLLAPSE against an anon vma - "mm: do not assume file == vma->vm_file in compat_vma_mmap_prepare()" from Lorenzo Stoakes moves us further towards removal of file_operations.mmap(). This patchset concentrates upon clearing up the treatment of stacked filesystems - "mm: Improve mlock tracking for large folios" from Kiryl Shutsemau provides some fixes and improvements to mlock's tracking of large folios. /proc/meminfo's "Mlocked" field became more accurate - "mm/ksm: Fix incorrect accounting of KSM counters during fork" from Donet Tom fixes several user-visible KSM stats inaccuracies across forks and adds selftest code to verify these counters - "mm_slot: fix the usage of mm_slot_entry" from Wei Yang addresses some potential but presently benign issues in KSM's mm_slot handling * tag 'mm-stable-2025-10-01-19-00' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/akpm/mm: (372 commits) mm: swap: check for stable address space before operating on the VMA mm: convert folio_page() back to a macro mm/khugepaged: use start_addr/addr for improved readability hugetlbfs: skip VMAs without shareable locks in hugetlb_vmdelete_list alloc_tag: fix boot failure due to NULL pointer dereference mm: silence data-race in update_hiwater_rss mm/memory-failure: don't select MEMORY_ISOLATION mm/khugepaged: remove definition of struct khugepaged_mm_slot mm/ksm: get mm_slot by mm_slot_entry() when slot is !NULL hugetlb: increase number of reserving hugepages via cmdline selftests/mm: add fork inheritance test for ksm_merging_pages counter mm/ksm: fix incorrect KSM counter handling in mm_struct during fork drivers/base/node: fix double free in register_one_node() mm: remove PMD alignment constraint in execmem_vmalloc() mm/memory_hotplug: fix typo 'esecially' -> 'especially' mm/rmap: improve mlock tracking for large folios mm/filemap: map entire large folio faultaround mm/fault: try to map the entire file folio in finish_fault() mm/rmap: mlock large folios in try_to_unmap_one() mm/rmap: fix a mlock race condition in folio_referenced_one() ...

Merge tag 'namespace-6.18-rc1' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs

2025-09-29T18:20:29+00:00

Pull namespace updates from Christian Brauner: "This contains a larger set of changes around the generic namespace infrastructure of the kernel. Each specific namespace type (net, cgroup, mnt, ...) embedds a struct ns_common which carries the reference count of the namespace and so on. We open-coded and cargo-culted so many quirks for each namespace type that it just wasn't scalable anymore. So given there's a bunch of new changes coming in that area I've started cleaning all of this up. The core change is to make it possible to correctly initialize every namespace uniformly and derive the correct initialization settings from the type of the namespace such as namespace operations, namespace type and so on. This leaves the new ns_common_init() function with a single parameter which is the specific namespace type which derives the correct parameters statically. This also means the compiler will yell as soon as someone does something remotely fishy. The ns_common_init() addition also allows us to remove ns_alloc_inum() and drops any special-casing of the initial network namespace in the network namespace initialization code that Linus complained about. Another part is reworking the reference counting. The reference counting was open-coded and copy-pasted for each namespace type even though they all followed the same rules. This also removes all open accesses to the reference count and makes it private and only uses a very small set of dedicated helpers to manipulate them just like we do for e.g., files. In addition this generalizes the mount namespace iteration infrastructure introduced a few cycles ago. As reminder, the vfs makes it possible to iterate sequentially and bidirectionally through all mount namespaces on the system or all mount namespaces that the caller holds privilege over. This allow userspace to iterate over all mounts in all mount namespaces using the listmount() and statmount() system call. Each mount namespace has a unique identifier for the lifetime of the systems that is exposed to userspace. The network namespace also has a unique identifier working exactly the same way. This extends the concept to all other namespace types. The new nstree type makes it possible to lookup namespaces purely by their identifier and to walk the namespace list sequentially and bidirectionally for all namespace types, allowing userspace to iterate through all namespaces. Looking up namespaces in the namespace tree works completely locklessly. This also means we can move the mount namespace onto the generic infrastructure and remove a bunch of code and members from struct mnt_namespace itself. There's a bunch of stuff coming on top of this in the future but for now this uses the generic namespace tree to extend a concept introduced first for pidfs a few cycles ago. For a while now we have supported pidfs file handles for pidfds. This has proven to be very useful. This extends the concept to cover namespaces as well. It is possible to encode and decode namespace file handles using the common name_to_handle_at() and open_by_handle_at() apis. As with pidfs file handles, namespace file handles are exhaustive, meaning it is not required to actually hold a reference to nsfs in able to decode aka open_by_handle_at() a namespace file handle. Instead the FD_NSFS_ROOT constant can be passed which will let the kernel grab a reference to the root of nsfs internally and thus decode the file handle. Namespaces file descriptors can already be derived from pidfds which means they aren't subject to overmount protection bugs. IOW, it's irrelevant if the caller would not have access to an appropriate /proc//ns/ directory as they could always just derive the namespace based on a pidfd already. It has the same advantage as pidfds. It's possible to reliably and for the lifetime of the system refer to a namespace without pinning any resources and to compare them trivially. Permission checking is kept simple. If the caller is located in the namespace the file handle refers to they are able to open it otherwise they must hold privilege over the owning namespace of the relevant namespace. The namespace file handle layout is exposed as uapi and has a stable and extensible format. For now it simply contains the namespace identifier, the namespace type, and the inode number. The stable format means that userspace may construct its own namespace file handles without going through name_to_handle_at() as they are already allowed for pidfs and cgroup file handles" * tag 'namespace-6.18-rc1' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs: (65 commits) ns: drop assert ns: move ns type into struct ns_common nstree: make struct ns_tree private ns: add ns_debug() ns: simplify ns_common_init() further cgroup: add missing ns_common include ns: use inode initializer for initial namespaces selftests/namespaces: verify initial namespace inode numbers ns: rename to __ns_ref nsfs: port to ns_ref_*() helpers net: port to ns_ref_*() helpers uts: port to ns_ref_*() helpers ipv4: use check_net() net: use check_net() net-sysfs: use check_net() user: port to ns_ref_*() helpers time: port to ns_ref_*() helpers pid: port to ns_ref_*() helpers ipc: port to ns_ref_*() helpers cgroup: port to ns_ref_*() helpers ...

Merge tag 'vfs-6.18-rc1.pidfs' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs

2025-09-29T17:02:35+00:00

Pull pidfs updates from Christian Brauner: "This just contains a few changes to pid_nr_ns() to make it more robust and cleans up or improves a few users that ab- or misuse it currently" * tag 'vfs-6.18-rc1.pidfs' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/vfs/vfs: pid: change task_state() to use task_ppid_nr_ns() pid: change bacct_add_tsk() to use task_ppid_nr_ns() pid: make __task_pid_nr_ns(ns => NULL) safe for zombie callers pid: Add a judgment for ns null in pid_nr_ns