• Aleksa Sarai's avatar
    open: introduce openat2(2) syscall · fddb5d43
    Aleksa Sarai authored
    /* Background. */
    For a very long time, extending openat(2) with new features has been
    incredibly frustrating. This stems from the fact that openat(2) is
    possibly the most famous counter-example to the mantra "don't silently
    accept garbage from userspace" -- it doesn't check whether unknown flags
    are present[1].
    
    This means that (generally) the addition of new flags to openat(2) has
    been fraught with backwards-compatibility issues (O_TMPFILE has to be
    defined as __O_TMPFILE|O_DIRECTORY|[O_RDWR or O_WRONLY] to ensure old
    kernels gave errors, since it's insecure to silently ignore the
    flag[2]). All new security-related flags therefore have a tough road to
    being added to openat(2).
    
    Userspace also has a hard time figuring out whether a particular flag is
    supported on a particular kernel. While it is now possible with
    contemporary kernels (thanks to [3]), older kernels will expose unknown
    flag bits through fcntl(F_GETFL). Giving a clear -EINVAL during
    openat(2) time matches ...
    fddb5d43
CREDITS 97.3 KB