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88e4607034
The motivation for this patch has been to enable using a stricter
apparmor profile to prevent programs from reading any coredump in the
system.
However, this became something else. The following details are based on
Christian's and Linus' archeology into the history of the number "2" in
the coredump handling code.
To make sure we're not accidently introducing some subtle behavioral
change into the coredump code we set out on a voyage into the depths of
history.git to figure out why this was O_RDWR in the first place.
Coredump handling was introduced over 30 years ago in commit
ddc733f452e0 ("[PATCH] Linux-0.97 (August 1, 1992)").
The original code used O_WRONLY:
open_namei("core",O_CREAT | O_WRONLY | O_TRUNC,0600,&inode,NULL)
However, this changed in 1993 and starting with commit
9cb9f18b5d26 ("[PATCH] Linux-0.99.10 (June 7, 1993)") the coredump code
suddenly used the constant "2":
open_namei("core",O_CREAT | 2 | O_TRUNC,0600,&inode,NULL)
This was curious as in the same commit the kernel switched from
constants to proper defines in other places such as KERNEL_DS and
USER_DS and O_RDWR did already exist.
So why was "2" used? It turns out that open_namei() - an early version
of what later turned into filp_open() - didn't accept O_RDWR.
A semantic quirk of the open() uapi is the definition of the O_RDONLY
flag. It would seem natural to define:
#define O_RDWR (O_RDONLY | O_WRONLY)
but that isn't possible because:
#define O_RDONLY 0
This makes O_RDONLY effectively meaningless when passed to the kernel.
In other words, there has never been a way - until O_PATH at least - to
open a file without any permission; O_RDONLY was always implied on the
uapi side while the kernel does in fact allow opening files without
permissions.
The trouble comes when trying to map the uapi flags onto the
corresponding file mode flags FMODE_{READ,WRITE}. This mapping still
happens today and is causing issues to this day (We ran into this
during additions for openat2() for example.).
So the special value "3" was used to indicate that the file was opened
for special access:
f->f_flags = flag = flags;
f->f_mode = (flag+1) & O_ACCMODE;
if (f->f_mode)
flag++;
This allowed the file mode to be set to FMODE_READ | FMODE_WRITE mapping
the O_{RDONLY,WRONLY,RDWR} flags into the FMODE_{READ,WRITE} flags. The
special access then required read-write permissions and 0 was used to
access symlinks.
But back when ddc733f452e0 ("[PATCH] Linux-0.97 (August 1, 1992)") added
coredump handling open_namei() took the FMODE_{READ,WRITE} flags as an
argument. So the coredump handling introduced in
ddc733f452e0 ("[PATCH] Linux-0.97 (August 1, 1992)") was buggy because
O_WRONLY shouldn't have been passed. Since O_WRONLY is 1 but
open_namei() took FMODE_{READ,WRITE} it was passed FMODE_READ on
accident.
So 9cb9f18b5d26 ("[PATCH] Linux-0.99.10 (June 7, 1993)") was a bugfix
for this and the 2 didn't really mean O_RDWR, it meant FMODE_WRITE which
was correct.
The clue is that FMODE_{READ,WRITE} didn't exist yet and thus a raw "2"
value was passed.
Fast forward 5 years when around 2.2.4pre4 (February 16, 1999) this code
was changed to:
- dentry = open_namei(corefile,O_CREAT | 2 | O_TRUNC | O_NOFOLLOW, 0600);
...
+ file = filp_open(corefile,O_CREAT | 2 | O_TRUNC | O_NOFOLLOW, 0600);
At this point the raw "2" should have become O_WRONLY again as
filp_open() didn't take FMODE_{READ,WRITE} but O_{RDONLY,WRONLY,RDWR}.
Another 17 years later, the code was changed again cementing the mistake
and making it almost impossible to detect when commit
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Linux kernel
============
There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.
In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``. The formatted documentation can also be read online at:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/
There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.