[PATCH v19 0/4] overlayfs override_creds=off & nested get xattr fix

[Paul Moore]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2022 at 12:05 AM David Anderson <dvander at google.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 5:09 PM Paul Moore <paul at paul-moore.com> wrote:
>>
>> I wanted to try and bring this thread back from the dead (?) as I
>> believe the use-case is still valid and worth supporting.  Some more
>> brief comments below ...
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 3, 2021 at 1:34 PM Vivek Goyal <vgoyal at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > I am not sure. In the early version of patches I think argument was
>> > that do not switch to mounter's creds and use caller's creds on
>> > underlying filesystem as well. And each caller will be privileged
>> > enough to be able to perform the operation.
>
> Indeed that was the argument - though, "userxattr" eliminated the need for patches 1 & 2 completely for us, which is great. We're no longer carrying those in our 5.15 tree.
>
>> Unfortunately, this idea falls apart when we attempt to use overlayfs
>> due to the clever/usual way it caches the mounting processes
>> credentials and uses that in place of the current process' credentials
>> when accessing certain parts of the underlying filesystems.  The
>> current overlayfs implementation assumes that the mounter will always
>> be more privileged than the processes accessing the filesystem, it
>> would be nice if we could build a mechanism that didn't have this
>> assumption baked into the implementation.
>>
>> This patchset may not have been The Answer, but surely there is
>> something we can do to support this use-case.
>
> Yup exactly, and we still need patches 3 & 4 to deal with this. My current plan is to try and rework our sepolicy (we have some ideas on how it could be made compatible with how overlayfs works). If that doesn't pan out we'll revisit these patches and think harder about how to deal with the coherency issues.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the coherency issues?  Is this the dir
cache issue that is alluded to in the patchset?  Anything else that
has come up on review?

Before I start looking at the dir cache in any detail, did you have
any thoughts on how to resolve the problems that have arisen?

-- 
paul-moore.com