Re: New procfs implementation

[Samuel Thibault]

Jeremie Koenig, le Sat 04 Sep 2010 01:07:21 +0200, a écrit :
> On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 09:16:50PM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> (...)
> > > Ah, so it's really not like "nobody", that's for tasks whose owner is
> > > yet unknown, but potentially root-owned or such, or something like this?
> 
> These tasks (for instance the login shells) don't have any uid associated
> to them, and no owner either. So it's kindof like running as "nobody",
> as far as these processes are concerned.

Ok, but created files aren't given to "nobody", but to root.

> However, the uid we publish for the procfs files determines who can read
> the "environ" and "stat" files (though the latter is made world-readable
> in compat mode), and we don't want to allow "nobody" to do that.

Yep.

> > > I don't know exactly the rules, but I feel like (uid_t) -1 might be
> > > exactly what we need here.
> 
> (uid_t) -1 is what the proc server reports for tasks without an owner,
> but it's not really legitimate for filesystem use (unlike the Hurd
> processes, inodes have exactly one uid associated to them.)

Right.

> > (...)
> > You should however probably rephrase: rather than "anonymous-owner",
> > which could be understood as "anybody can read it, that's fine", it
> > should probably be called for instance "unknown-user", as it belongs
> > to somebody, we just don't know whom.
> 
> How about "--default-owner" or "--default-uid" ?

"default" could imply that it's used for much more cases than just this
one.  What about "no-owner"?

Samuel