New kind of open files - "location only".

New flag for open(2) - O_PATH.  Semantics:
	* pathname is resolved, but the file itself is _NOT_ opened
as far as filesystem is concerned.
	* almost all operations on the resulting descriptors shall
fail with -EBADF.  Exceptions are:
	1) operations on descriptors themselves (i.e.
		close(), dup(), dup2(), dup3(), fcntl(fd, F_DUPFD),
		fcntl(fd, F_DUPFD_CLOEXEC, ...), fcntl(fd, F_GETFD),
		fcntl(fd, F_SETFD, ...))
	2) fcntl(fd, F_GETFL), for a common non-destructive way to
		check if descriptor is open
	3) "dfd" arguments of ...at(2) syscalls, i.e. the starting
		points of pathname resolution
	* closing such descriptor does *NOT* affect dnotify or
posix locks.
	* permissions are checked as usual along the way to file;
no permission checks are applied to the file itself.  Of course,
giving such thing to syscall will result in permission checks (at
the moment it means checking that starting point of ....at() is
a directory and caller has exec permissions on it).

fget() and fget_light() return NULL on such descriptors; use of
fget_raw() and fget_raw_light() is needed to get them.  That protects
existing code from dealing with those things.

There are two things still missing (they come in the next commits):
one is handling of symlinks (right now we refuse to open them that
way; see the next commit for semantics related to those) and another
is descriptor passing via SCM_RIGHTS datagrams.

Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index f2143e0942c2..13df14e2c42e 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -102,6 +102,9 @@ struct inodes_stat_t {
 /* File is huge (eg. /dev/kmem): treat loff_t as unsigned */
 #define FMODE_UNSIGNED_OFFSET	((__force fmode_t)0x2000)
 
+/* File is opened with O_PATH; almost nothing can be done with it */
+#define FMODE_PATH		((__force fmode_t)0x4000)
+
 /* File was opened by fanotify and shouldn't generate fanotify events */
 #define FMODE_NONOTIFY		((__force fmode_t)0x1000000)