Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next rfc 0/2] Allow unpriveledge user to disable tuntap queue

From: Jason Wang <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:29:07 +0800

On 12/11/2012 08:46 PM, Michael S. Tsirkin wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 07:03:45PM +0800, Jason Wang wrote:
>> This series is an rfc that tries to solve the issue that the queues of tuntap
>> could not be disabled/enabled by unpriveledged user. This is needed for
>> unpriveledge userspace such as qemu since guest may change the number of queues
>> at any time, qemu needs to configure the tuntap to disable/enable a specific
>> queue.
>>
>> Instead of introducting new flag/ioctls, this series tries to re-use the current
>> TUNSETQUEUE and IFF_ATTACH_QUEUE/IFF_DETACH_QUEUE. After this change,
>> IFF_DETACH_QUEUE is used to disable a specific queue instead of detaching all
>> its state from tuntap. IFF_ATTACH_QUEUE is used to do: 1) creating new queue to
>> a tuntap device, in this situation, previous DAC check is still done. 2)
>> re-enable the queue previously disabled by IFF_DETACH_QUEUE, in this situation,
>> we can bypass some checking when we do during queue creating (the check need to
>> be done here needs discussion.
>>
>> Management software (such as libvirt) then can do:
>> - TUNSETIFF to creating device and queue 0
>> - TUNSETQUEUE to create the rest of queues
>> - Passing them to unpriveledge userspace (such as qemu)
> Sorry I find this somewhat confusing.
> Why doesn't management call TUNSETIFF to create all queues -
> seems cleaner, no? Also has the advantage that it works
> without selinux changes.

The issue is how to return those fds through TUNSETIFF. Looks like
there's no space in ifreq for TUNSETIFF, we need another new ioctls to
do this.
>
> So why don't we simply fix TUNSETQUEUE such that
> 1. It only works if already attached to device by TUNSETIFF
> 2. It does not attach/detach, instead simply enables/disables the queue

This is just what this patch does, the only different is when calling
TUNSETQUEUE through a fd without attaching to the device, it is used to
create the queue.
> This way no new flags, just tweak the semantics of the
> existing ones. Need to do this before 3.8 is out though
> otherwise we'll end up maintaining the old semantics forever.
>

Yes, I will try to solve this issue soon.
>> Then the unpriveledge userspace can enable and disable a specific queue through
>> IFF_ATTACH_QUEUE and IFF_DETACH_QUEUE.
>>
>> This is done by introducing a enabled flags were used to notify whether the
>> queue is enabled, and tuntap only send/receive packets when it was enabled.
>>
>> Please comment, thanks!
>>
>> Jason Wang (2):
>>   tuntap: forbid calling TUNSETQUEUE for a persistent device with no
>>     queues
>>   tuntap: allow unpriveledge user to enable and disable queues
>>
>>  drivers/net/tun.c |   78 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---
>>  1 files changed, 73 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
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