kernel/linux.git/include/linux/mnt_namespace.h, branch v6.19.11

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 ...

mnt: expose pointer to init_mnt_ns

2025-09-19T12:26:18+00:00

There's various scenarios where we need to know whether we are in the initial set of namespaces or not to e.g., shortcut permission checking. All namespaces expose that information. Let's do that too. Reviewed-by: Jan Kara Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner

copy_process: pass clone_flags as u64 across calltree

2025-09-01T13:31:34+00:00

With the introduction of clone3 in commit 7f192e3cd316 ("fork: add clone3") the effective bit width of clone_flags on all architectures was increased from 32-bit to 64-bit, with a new type of u64 for the flags. However, for most consumers of clone_flags the interface was not changed from the previous type of unsigned long. While this works fine as long as none of the new 64-bit flag bits (CLONE_CLEAR_SIGHAND and CLONE_INTO_CGROUP) are evaluated, this is still undesirable in terms of the principle of least surprise. Thus, this commit fixes all relevant interfaces of callees to sys_clone3/copy_process (excluding the architecture-specific copy_thread) to consistently pass clone_flags as u64, so that no truncation to 32-bit integers occurs on 32-bit architectures. Signed-off-by: Simon Schuster Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20250901-nios2-implement-clone3-v2-2-53fcf5577d57@siemens-energy.com Acked-by: David Hildenbrand Reviewed-by: Lorenzo Stoakes Reviewed-by: Arnd Bergmann Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner

fs: add put_mnt_ns() cleanup helper

2024-08-09T10:44:50+00:00

Add a simple helper to put a mount namespace reference. Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240719-work-mount-namespace-v1-3-834113cab0d2@kernel.org Reviewed-by: Josef Bacik Reviewed-by: Jeff Layton Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner

nsproxy: attach to namespaces via pidfds

2020-05-13T09:41:22+00:00

For quite a while we have been thinking about using pidfds to attach to namespaces. This patchset has existed for about a year already but we've wanted to wait to see how the general api would be received and adopted. Now that more and more programs in userspace have started using pidfds for process management it's time to send this one out. This patch makes it possible to use pidfds to attach to the namespaces of another process, i.e. they can be passed as the first argument to the setns() syscall. When only a single namespace type is specified the semantics are equivalent to passing an nsfd. That means setns(nsfd, CLONE_NEWNET) equals setns(pidfd, CLONE_NEWNET). However, when a pidfd is passed, multiple namespace flags can be specified in the second setns() argument and setns() will attach the caller to all the specified namespaces all at once or to none of them. Specifying 0 is not valid together with a pidfd. Here are just two obvious examples: setns(pidfd, CLONE_NEWPID | CLONE_NEWNS | CLONE_NEWNET); setns(pidfd, CLONE_NEWUSER); Allowing to also attach subsets of namespaces supports various use-cases where callers setns to a subset of namespaces to retain privilege, perform an action and then re-attach another subset of namespaces. If the need arises, as Eric suggested, we can extend this patchset to assume even more context than just attaching all namespaces. His suggestion specifically was about assuming the process' root directory when setns(pidfd, 0) or setns(pidfd, SETNS_PIDFD) is specified. For now, just keep it flexible in terms of supporting subsets of namespaces but let's wait until we have users asking for even more context to be assumed. At that point we can add an extension. The obvious example where this is useful is a standard container manager interacting with a running container: pushing and pulling files or directories, injecting mounts, attaching/execing any kind of process, managing network devices all these operations require attaching to all or at least multiple namespaces at the same time. Given that nowadays most containers are spawned with all namespaces enabled we're currently looking at at least 14 syscalls, 7 to open the /proc//ns/ nsfds, another 7 to actually perform the namespace switch. With time namespaces we're looking at about 16 syscalls. (We could amortize the first 7 or 8 syscalls for opening the nsfds by stashing them in each container's monitor process but that would mean we need to send around those file descriptors through unix sockets everytime we want to interact with the container or keep on-disk state. Even in scenarios where a caller wants to join a particular namespace in a particular order callers still profit from batching other namespaces. That mostly applies to the user namespace but all container runtimes I found join the user namespace first no matter if it privileges or deprivileges the container similar to how unshare behaves.) With pidfds this becomes a single syscall no matter how many namespaces are supposed to be attached to. A decently designed, large-scale container manager usually isn't the parent of any of the containers it spawns so the containers don't die when it crashes or needs to update or reinitialize. This means that for the manager to interact with containers through pids is inherently racy especially on systems where the maximum pid number is not significicantly bumped. This is even more problematic since we often spawn and manage thousands or ten-thousands of containers. Interacting with a container through a pid thus can become risky quite quickly. Especially since we allow for an administrator to enable advanced features such as syscall interception where we're performing syscalls in lieu of the container. In all of those cases we use pidfds if they are available and we pass them around as stable references. Using them to setns() to the target process' namespaces is as reliable as using nsfds. Either the target process is already dead and we get ESRCH or we manage to attach to its namespaces but we can't accidently attach to another process' namespaces. So pidfds lend themselves to be used with this api. The other main advantage is that with this change the pidfd becomes the only relevant token for most container interactions and it's the only token we need to create and send around. Apart from significiantly reducing the number of syscalls from double digit to single digit which is a decent reason post-spectre/meltdown this also allows to switch to a set of namespaces atomically, i.e. either attaching to all the specified namespaces succeeds or we fail. If we fail we haven't changed a single namespace. There are currently three namespaces that can fail (other than for ENOMEM which really is not very interesting since we then have other problems anyway) for non-trivial reasons, user, mount, and pid namespaces. We can fail to attach to a pid namespace if it is not our current active pid namespace or a descendant of it. We can fail to attach to a user namespace because we are multi-threaded or because our current mount namespace shares filesystem state with other tasks, or because we're trying to setns() to the same user namespace, i.e. the target task has the same user namespace as we do. We can fail to attach to a mount namespace because it shares filesystem state with other tasks or because we fail to lookup the new root for the new mount namespace. In most non-pathological scenarios these issues can be somewhat mitigated. But there are cases where we're half-attached to some namespace and failing to attach to another one. I've talked about some of these problem during the hallway track (something only the pre-COVID-19 generation will remember) of Plumbers in Los Angeles in 2018(?). Even if all these issues could be avoided with super careful userspace coding it would be nicer to have this done in-kernel. Pidfds seem to lend themselves nicely for this. The other neat thing about this is that setns() becomes an actual counterpart to the namespace bits of unshare(). Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner Reviewed-by: Serge Hallyn Cc: Eric W. Biederman Cc: Serge Hallyn Cc: Jann Horn Cc: Michael Kerrisk Cc: Aleksa Sarai Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200505140432.181565-3-christian.brauner@ubuntu.com

nsproxy: add struct nsset

2020-05-09T11:57:12+00:00

Add a simple struct nsset. It holds all necessary pieces to switch to a new set of namespaces without leaving a task in a half-switched state which we will make use of in the next patch. This patch switches the existing setns logic over without causing a change in setns() behavior. This brings setns() closer to how unshare() works(). The prepare_ns() function is responsible to prepare all necessary information. This has two reasons. First it minimizes dependencies between individual namespaces, i.e. all install handler can expect that all fields are properly initialized independent in what order they are called in. Second, this makes the code easier to maintain and easier to follow if it needs to be changed. The prepare_ns() helper will only be switched over to use a flags argument in the next patch. Here it will still use nstype as a simple integer argument which was argued would be clearer. I'm not particularly opinionated about this if it really helps or not. The struct nsset itself already contains the flags field since its name already indicates that it can contain information required by different namespaces. None of this should have functional consequences. Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner Reviewed-by: Serge Hallyn Cc: Eric W. Biederman Cc: Serge Hallyn Cc: Jann Horn Cc: Michael Kerrisk Cc: Aleksa Sarai Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200505140432.181565-2-christian.brauner@ubuntu.com

License cleanup: add SPDX GPL-2.0 license identifier to files with no license

2017-11-02T10:10:55+00:00

Many source files in the tree are missing licensing information, which makes it harder for compliance tools to determine the correct license. By default all files without license information are under the default license of the kernel, which is GPL version 2. Update the files which contain no license information with the 'GPL-2.0' SPDX license identifier. The SPDX identifier is a legally binding shorthand, which can be used instead of the full boiler plate text. This patch is based on work done by Thomas Gleixner and Kate Stewart and Philippe Ombredanne. How this work was done: Patches were generated and checked against linux-4.14-rc6 for a subset of the use cases: - file had no licensing information it it. - file was a */uapi/* one with no licensing information in it, - file was a */uapi/* one with existing licensing information, Further patches will be generated in subsequent months to fix up cases where non-standard license headers were used, and references to license had to be inferred by heuristics based on keywords. The analysis to determine which SPDX License Identifier to be applied to a file was done in a spreadsheet of side by side results from of the output of two independent scanners (ScanCode & Windriver) producing SPDX tag:value files created by Philippe Ombredanne. Philippe prepared the base worksheet, and did an initial spot review of a few 1000 files. The 4.13 kernel was the starting point of the analysis with 60,537 files assessed. Kate Stewart did a file by file comparison of the scanner results in the spreadsheet to determine which SPDX license identifier(s) to be applied to the file. She confirmed any determination that was not immediately clear with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation. Criteria used to select files for SPDX license identifier tagging was: - Files considered eligible had to be source code files. - Make and config files were included as candidates if they contained >5 lines of source - File already had some variant of a license header in it (even if <5 lines). All documentation files were explicitly excluded. The following heuristics were used to determine which SPDX license identifiers to apply. - when both scanners couldn't find any license traces, file was considered to have no license information in it, and the top level COPYING file license applied. For non */uapi/* files that summary was: SPDX license identifier # files ---------------------------------------------------|------- GPL-2.0 11139 and resulted in the first patch in this series. If that file was a */uapi/* path one, it was "GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note" otherwise it was "GPL-2.0". Results of that was: SPDX license identifier # files ---------------------------------------------------|------- GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 930 and resulted in the second patch in this series. - if a file had some form of licensing information in it, and was one of the */uapi/* ones, it was denoted with the Linux-syscall-note if any GPL family license was found in the file or had no licensing in it (per prior point). Results summary: SPDX license identifier # files ---------------------------------------------------|------ GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note 270 GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 169 ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-2-Clause) 21 ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) 17 LGPL-2.1+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 15 GPL-1.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 14 ((GPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR BSD-3-Clause) 5 LGPL-2.0+ WITH Linux-syscall-note 4 LGPL-2.1 WITH Linux-syscall-note 3 ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) OR MIT) 3 ((GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note) AND MIT) 1 and that resulted in the third patch in this series. - when the two scanners agreed on the detected license(s), that became the concluded license(s). - when there was disagreement between the two scanners (one detected a license but the other didn't, or they both detected different licenses) a manual inspection of the file occurred. - In most cases a manual inspection of the information in the file resulted in a clear resolution of the license that should apply (and which scanner probably needed to revisit its heuristics). - When it was not immediately clear, the license identifier was confirmed with lawyers working with the Linux Foundation. - If there was any question as to the appropriate license identifier, the file was flagged for further research and to be revisited later in time. In total, over 70 hours of logged manual review was done on the spreadsheet to determine the SPDX license identifiers to apply to the source files by Kate, Philippe, Thomas and, in some cases, confirmation by lawyers working with the Linux Foundation. Kate also obtained a third independent scan of the 4.13 code base from FOSSology, and compared selected files where the other two scanners disagreed against that SPDX file, to see if there was new insights. The Windriver scanner is based on an older version of FOSSology in part, so they are related. Thomas did random spot checks in about 500 files from the spreadsheets for the uapi headers and agreed with SPDX license identifier in the files he inspected. For the non-uapi files Thomas did random spot checks in about 15000 files. In initial set of patches against 4.14-rc6, 3 files were found to have copy/paste license identifier errors, and have been fixed to reflect the correct identifier. Additionally Philippe spent 10 hours this week doing a detailed manual inspection and review of the 12,461 patched files from the initial patch version early this week with: - a full scancode scan run, collecting the matched texts, detected license ids and scores - reviewing anything where there was a license detected (about 500+ files) to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct - reviewing anything where there was no detection but the patch license was not GPL-2.0 WITH Linux-syscall-note to ensure that the applied SPDX license was correct This produced a worksheet with 20 files needing minor correction. This worksheet was then exported into 3 different .csv files for the different types of files to be modified. These .csv files were then reviewed by Greg. Thomas wrote a script to parse the csv files and add the proper SPDX tag to the file, in the format that the file expected. This script was further refined by Greg based on the output to detect more types of files automatically and to distinguish between header and source .c files (which need different comment types.) Finally Greg ran the script using the .csv files to generate the patches. Reviewed-by: Kate Stewart Reviewed-by: Philippe Ombredanne Reviewed-by: Thomas Gleixner Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman

vfs: Add a user namespace reference from struct mnt_namespace

2012-11-19T13:59:19+00:00

This will allow for support for unprivileged mounts in a new user namespace. Acked-by: "Serge E. Hallyn" Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman"

vfs: take /proc/*/mounts and friends to fs/proc_namespace.c

2012-01-04T03:57:13+00:00

rationale: that stuff is far tighter bound to fs/namespace.c than to the guts of procfs proper. Signed-off-by: Al Viro

unexport put_mnt_ns(), make create_mnt_ns() static outright

2012-01-04T03:52:37+00:00

Signed-off-by: Al Viro