Re: [PATCH] capabilities: add capability cgroup controller

From: Serge E. Hallyn
Date: Fri Jun 24 2016 - 11:59:24 EST


Quoting Tejun Heo (tj@xxxxxxxxxx):
> Hello,
>
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 12:22:54AM +0000, Topi Miettinen wrote:
> > > This doesn't have anything to do with resource control and I don't
> > > think it's a good idea to add arbitrary monitoring mechanisms to
> > > cgroup just because it's easy to add interface there. Given that
> > > capabilities are inherited and modified through the process hierarchy,
> > > shouldn't this be part of that?
> >
> > With per process tracking, it's easy to miss if a short-lived process
> > exercised capabilities. Especially with ambient capabilities, the parent
> > process could be a shell script which might not use capabilities at all,
> > but its children do the heavy lifting.
>
> But isn't being recursive orthogonal to using cgroup? Why not account
> usages recursively along the process hierarchy? Capabilities don't
> have much to do with cgroup but everything with process hierarchy.
> That's how they're distributed and modified. If monitoring their
> usages is necessary, it makes sense to do it in the same structure.

That was my argument against using cgroups to enforce a new bounding
set. For tracking though, the cgroup process tracking seems as applicable
to this as it does to systemd tracking of services. It tracks a task and
the children it forks.