Re: [RFC 1/1] shiftfs: uid/gid shifting bind mount

From: J. R. Okajima
Date: Mon Feb 20 2017 - 21:57:58 EST


James Bottomley:
> I realised as I was trimming down the vestigial inode properties in the
> patch that actually shiftfs does use the i_ino from the underlying for
> userspace. The reason why is that it comes from the getattr call in
> stat and that's fully what the underlying filesystem returns (including
> the inode number).

Let me make sure.
- shiftfs has its own inode, but it will never be visible to userspace.
- the inode attr visible to users are equivalent to the underlying one,
includeing dev:ino pair.
right?
If so, I am afraid it will make users confused. The dev:ino pair is a
system-wide identity, but shiftfs creates the same dev:ino pair with
different owner. Though I don't know whether the actual application or
LSM exists or not who will be damaged by this situation.
For git-status case which I wrote previously, it might not be a problem
as long as dev:ino is unchanged from git index.
But such filesystem looks weird.


J. R. Okajima