Commit Graph

67 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Alexey Dobriyan
db3f600124 uapi: move forward declarations of internal structures
Don't user forward declarations of internal kernel structures in headers
exported to userspace.

Move "struct completion;".
Move "struct task_struct;".

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20160713215808.GA22486@p183.telecom.by
Signed-off-by: Alexey Dobriyan <adobriyan@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2016-08-02 17:31:41 -04:00
Tyler Hicks
98f368e9e2 kernel: Add noaudit variant of ns_capable()
When checking the current cred for a capability in a specific user
namespace, it isn't always desirable to have the LSMs audit the check.
This patch adds a noaudit variant of ns_capable() for when those
situations arise.

The common logic between ns_capable() and the new ns_capable_noaudit()
is moved into a single, shared function to keep duplicated code to a
minimum and ease maintainability.

Signed-off-by: Tyler Hicks <tyhicks@canonical.com>
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <james.l.morris@oracle.com>
2016-06-06 20:16:18 +10:00
Arnd Bergmann
0335695dfa cred/userns: define current_user_ns() as a function
The current_user_ns() macro currently returns &init_user_ns when user
namespaces are disabled, and that causes several warnings when building
with gcc-6.0 in code that compares the result of the macro to
&init_user_ns itself:

  fs/xfs/xfs_ioctl.c: In function 'xfs_ioctl_setattr_check_projid':
  fs/xfs/xfs_ioctl.c:1249:22: error: self-comparison always evaluates to true [-Werror=tautological-compare]
    if (current_user_ns() == &init_user_ns)

This is a legitimate warning in principle, but here it isn't really
helpful, so I'm reprasing the definition in a way that shuts up the
warning.  Apparently gcc only warns when comparing identical literals,
but it can figure out that the result of an inline function can be
identical to a constant expression in order to optimize a condition yet
not warn about the fact that the condition is known at compile time.
This is exactly what we want here, and it looks reasonable because we
generally prefer inline functions over macros anyway.

Signed-off-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Cc: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: Yaowei Bai <baiyaowei@cmss.chinamobile.com>
Cc: James Morris <james.l.morris@oracle.com>
Cc: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2016-03-22 15:36:02 -07:00
Yaowei Bai
e42852bf88 security/capability.h: cap_issubset/isclear can be boolean
This patch makes cap_issubset/isclear return bool due to these
functions only using either one or zero as their return
value.

No functional change.

Signed-off-by: Yaowei Bai <baiyaowei@cmss.chinamobile.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <james.l.morris@oracle.com>
2015-11-18 11:20:40 +11:00
Yaowei Bai
f70be6dac6 security: remove unused cap_is_fs_cap function
Since commit 3bc1fa8a ("LSM: remove BSD secure level security module")
there is no user of cap_is_fs_cap any more, so remove it.

Signed-off-by: Yaowei Bai <baiyaowei@cmss.chinamobile.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: James Morris <james.l.morris@oracle.com>
2015-11-18 11:20:38 +11:00
Iulia Manda
2813893f8b kernel: conditionally support non-root users, groups and capabilities
There are a lot of embedded systems that run most or all of their
functionality in init, running as root:root.  For these systems,
supporting multiple users is not necessary.

This patch adds a new symbol, CONFIG_MULTIUSER, that makes support for
non-root users, non-root groups, and capabilities optional.  It is enabled
under CONFIG_EXPERT menu.

When this symbol is not defined, UID and GID are zero in any possible case
and processes always have all capabilities.

The following syscalls are compiled out: setuid, setregid, setgid,
setreuid, setresuid, getresuid, setresgid, getresgid, setgroups,
getgroups, setfsuid, setfsgid, capget, capset.

Also, groups.c is compiled out completely.

In kernel/capability.c, capable function was moved in order to avoid
adding two ifdef blocks.

This change saves about 25 KB on a defconfig build.  The most minimal
kernels have total text sizes in the high hundreds of kB rather than
low MB.  (The 25k goes down a bit with allnoconfig, but not that much.

The kernel was booted in Qemu.  All the common functionalities work.
Adding users/groups is not possible, failing with -ENOSYS.

Bloat-o-meter output:
add/remove: 7/87 grow/shrink: 19/397 up/down: 1675/-26325 (-24650)

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
Signed-off-by: Iulia Manda <iulia.manda21@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Acked-by: Geert Uytterhoeven <geert@linux-m68k.org>
Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2015-04-15 16:35:22 -07:00
Eric Paris
7d8b6c6375 CAPABILITIES: remove undefined caps from all processes
This is effectively a revert of 7b9a7ec565
plus fixing it a different way...

We found, when trying to run an application from an application which
had dropped privs that the kernel does security checks on undefined
capability bits.  This was ESPECIALLY difficult to debug as those
undefined bits are hidden from /proc/$PID/status.

Consider a root application which drops all capabilities from ALL 4
capability sets.  We assume, since the application is going to set
eff/perm/inh from an array that it will clear not only the defined caps
less than CAP_LAST_CAP, but also the higher 28ish bits which are
undefined future capabilities.

The BSET gets cleared differently.  Instead it is cleared one bit at a
time.  The problem here is that in security/commoncap.c::cap_task_prctl()
we actually check the validity of a capability being read.  So any task
which attempts to 'read all things set in bset' followed by 'unset all
things set in bset' will not even attempt to unset the undefined bits
higher than CAP_LAST_CAP.

So the 'parent' will look something like:
CapInh:	0000000000000000
CapPrm:	0000000000000000
CapEff:	0000000000000000
CapBnd:	ffffffc000000000

All of this 'should' be fine.  Given that these are undefined bits that
aren't supposed to have anything to do with permissions.  But they do...

So lets now consider a task which cleared the eff/perm/inh completely
and cleared all of the valid caps in the bset (but not the invalid caps
it couldn't read out of the kernel).  We know that this is exactly what
the libcap-ng library does and what the go capabilities library does.
They both leave you in that above situation if you try to clear all of
you capapabilities from all 4 sets.  If that root task calls execve()
the child task will pick up all caps not blocked by the bset.  The bset
however does not block bits higher than CAP_LAST_CAP.  So now the child
task has bits in eff which are not in the parent.  These are
'meaningless' undefined bits, but still bits which the parent doesn't
have.

The problem is now in cred_cap_issubset() (or any operation which does a
subset test) as the child, while a subset for valid cap bits, is not a
subset for invalid cap bits!  So now we set durring commit creds that
the child is not dumpable.  Given it is 'more priv' than its parent.  It
also means the parent cannot ptrace the child and other stupidity.

The solution here:
1) stop hiding capability bits in status
	This makes debugging easier!

2) stop giving any task undefined capability bits.  it's simple, it you
don't put those invalid bits in CAP_FULL_SET you won't get them in init
and you won't get them in any other task either.
	This fixes the cap_issubset() tests and resulting fallout (which
	made the init task in a docker container untraceable among other
	things)

3) mask out undefined bits when sys_capset() is called as it might use
~0, ~0 to denote 'all capabilities' for backward/forward compatibility.
	This lets 'capsh --caps="all=eip" -- -c /bin/bash' run.

4) mask out undefined bit when we read a file capability off of disk as
again likely all bits are set in the xattr for forward/backward
compatibility.
	This lets 'setcap all+pe /bin/bash; /bin/bash' run

Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Andrew Vagin <avagin@openvz.org>
Cc: Andrew G. Morgan <morgan@kernel.org>
Cc: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Cc: Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>
Cc: Steve Grubb <sgrubb@redhat.com>
Cc: Dan Walsh <dwalsh@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: James Morris <james.l.morris@oracle.com>
2014-07-24 21:53:47 +10:00
Andy Lutomirski
23adbe12ef fs,userns: Change inode_capable to capable_wrt_inode_uidgid
The kernel has no concept of capabilities with respect to inodes; inodes
exist independently of namespaces.  For example, inode_capable(inode,
CAP_LINUX_IMMUTABLE) would be nonsense.

This patch changes inode_capable to check for uid and gid mappings and
renames it to capable_wrt_inode_uidgid, which should make it more
obvious what it does.

Fixes CVE-2014-4014.

Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2014-06-10 13:57:22 -07:00
Eric W. Biederman
c7b96acf14 userns: Kill nsown_capable it makes the wrong thing easy
nsown_capable is a special case of ns_capable essentially for just CAP_SETUID and
CAP_SETGID.  For the existing users it doesn't noticably simplify things and
from the suggested patches I have seen it encourages people to do the wrong
thing.  So remove nsown_capable.

Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
2013-08-30 23:44:11 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
935d8aabd4 Add file_ns_capable() helper function for open-time capability checking
Nothing is using it yet, but this will allow us to delay the open-time
checks to use time, without breaking the normal UNIX permission
semantics where permissions are determined by the opener (and the file
descriptor can then be passed to a different process, or the process can
drop capabilities).

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2013-04-14 10:06:31 -07:00
David Howells
607ca46e97 UAPI: (Scripted) Disintegrate include/linux
Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Acked-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
2012-10-13 10:46:48 +01:00
Michael Kerrisk
d9914cf661 PM: Rename CAP_EPOLLWAKEUP to CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND
As discussed in
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1249726/focus=1288990,
the capability introduced in 4d7e30d989
to govern EPOLLWAKEUP seems misnamed: this capability is about governing
the ability to suspend the system, not using a particular API flag
(EPOLLWAKEUP). We should make the name of the capability more general
to encourage reuse in related cases. (Whether or not this capability
should also be used to govern the use of /sys/power/wake_lock is a
question that needs to be separately resolved.)

This patch renames the capability to CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND. In order to ensure
that the old capability name doesn't make it out into the wild, could you
please apply and push up the tree to ensure that it is incorporated
for the 3.5 release.

Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
2012-07-17 21:37:27 +02:00
Linus Torvalds
644473e9c6 Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace
Pull user namespace enhancements from Eric Biederman:
 "This is a course correction for the user namespace, so that we can
  reach an inexpensive, maintainable, and reasonably complete
  implementation.

  Highlights:
   - Config guards make it impossible to enable the user namespace and
     code that has not been converted to be user namespace safe.

   - Use of the new kuid_t type ensures the if you somehow get past the
     config guards the kernel will encounter type errors if you enable
     user namespaces and attempt to compile in code whose permission
     checks have not been updated to be user namespace safe.

   - All uids from child user namespaces are mapped into the initial
     user namespace before they are processed.  Removing the need to add
     an additional check to see if the user namespace of the compared
     uids remains the same.

   - With the user namespaces compiled out the performance is as good or
     better than it is today.

   - For most operations absolutely nothing changes performance or
     operationally with the user namespace enabled.

   - The worst case performance I could come up with was timing 1
     billion cache cold stat operations with the user namespace code
     enabled.  This went from 156s to 164s on my laptop (or 156ns to
     164ns per stat operation).

   - (uid_t)-1 and (gid_t)-1 are reserved as an internal error value.
     Most uid/gid setting system calls treat these value specially
     anyway so attempting to use -1 as a uid would likely cause
     entertaining failures in userspace.

   - If setuid is called with a uid that can not be mapped setuid fails.
     I have looked at sendmail, login, ssh and every other program I
     could think of that would call setuid and they all check for and
     handle the case where setuid fails.

   - If stat or a similar system call is called from a context in which
     we can not map a uid we lie and return overflowuid.  The LFS
     experience suggests not lying and returning an error code might be
     better, but the historical precedent with uids is different and I
     can not think of anything that would break by lying about a uid we
     can't map.

   - Capabilities are localized to the current user namespace making it
     safe to give the initial user in a user namespace all capabilities.

  My git tree covers all of the modifications needed to convert the core
  kernel and enough changes to make a system bootable to runlevel 1."

Fix up trivial conflicts due to nearby independent changes in fs/stat.c

* 'for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/ebiederm/user-namespace: (46 commits)
  userns:  Silence silly gcc warning.
  cred: use correct cred accessor with regards to rcu read lock
  userns: Convert the move_pages, and migrate_pages permission checks to use uid_eq
  userns: Convert cgroup permission checks to use uid_eq
  userns: Convert tmpfs to use kuid and kgid where appropriate
  userns: Convert sysfs to use kgid/kuid where appropriate
  userns: Convert sysctl permission checks to use kuid and kgids.
  userns: Convert proc to use kuid/kgid where appropriate
  userns: Convert ext4 to user kuid/kgid where appropriate
  userns: Convert ext3 to use kuid/kgid where appropriate
  userns: Convert ext2 to use kuid/kgid where appropriate.
  userns: Convert devpts to use kuid/kgid where appropriate
  userns: Convert binary formats to use kuid/kgid where appropriate
  userns: Add negative depends on entries to avoid building code that is userns unsafe
  userns: signal remove unnecessary map_cred_ns
  userns: Teach inode_capable to understand inodes whose uids map to other namespaces.
  userns: Fail exec for suid and sgid binaries with ids outside our user namespace.
  userns: Convert stat to return values mapped from kuids and kgids
  userns: Convert user specfied uids and gids in chown into kuids and kgid
  userns: Use uid_eq gid_eq helpers when comparing kuids and kgids in the vfs
  ...
2012-05-23 17:42:39 -07:00
Arve Hjønnevåg
4d7e30d989 epoll: Add a flag, EPOLLWAKEUP, to prevent suspend while epoll events are ready
When an epoll_event, that has the EPOLLWAKEUP flag set, is ready, a
wakeup_source will be active to prevent suspend. This can be used to
handle wakeup events from a driver that support poll, e.g. input, if
that driver wakes up the waitqueue passed to epoll before allowing
suspend.

Signed-off-by: Arve Hjønnevåg <arve@android.com>
Reviewed-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
2012-05-05 21:50:41 +02:00
Eric W. Biederman
1a48e2ac03 userns: Replace the hard to write inode_userns with inode_capable.
This represents a change in strategy of how to handle user namespaces.
Instead of tagging everything explicitly with a user namespace and bulking
up all of the comparisons of uids and gids in the kernel,  all uids and gids
in use will have a mapping to a flat kuid and kgid spaces respectively.  This
allows much more of the existing logic to be preserved and in general
allows for faster code.

In this new and improved world we allow someone to utiliize capabilities
over an inode if the inodes owner mapps into the capabilities holders user
namespace and the user has capabilities in their user namespace.  Which
is simple and efficient.

Moving the fs uid comparisons to be comparisons in a flat kuid space
follows in later patches, something that is only significant if you
are using user namespaces.

Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
2012-04-07 17:02:46 -07:00
Linus Torvalds
c49c41a413 Merge branch 'for-linus' of git://selinuxproject.org/~jmorris/linux-security
* 'for-linus' of git://selinuxproject.org/~jmorris/linux-security:
  capabilities: remove __cap_full_set definition
  security: remove the security_netlink_recv hook as it is equivalent to capable()
  ptrace: do not audit capability check when outputing /proc/pid/stat
  capabilities: remove task_ns_* functions
  capabitlies: ns_capable can use the cap helpers rather than lsm call
  capabilities: style only - move capable below ns_capable
  capabilites: introduce new has_ns_capabilities_noaudit
  capabilities: call has_ns_capability from has_capability
  capabilities: remove all _real_ interfaces
  capabilities: introduce security_capable_noaudit
  capabilities: reverse arguments to security_capable
  capabilities: remove the task from capable LSM hook entirely
  selinux: sparse fix: fix several warnings in the security server cod
  selinux: sparse fix: fix warnings in netlink code
  selinux: sparse fix: eliminate warnings for selinuxfs
  selinux: sparse fix: declare selinux_disable() in security.h
  selinux: sparse fix: move selinux_complete_init
  selinux: sparse fix: make selinux_secmark_refcount static
  SELinux: Fix RCU deref check warning in sel_netport_insert()

Manually fix up a semantic mis-merge wrt security_netlink_recv():

 - the interface was removed in commit fd77846152 ("security: remove
   the security_netlink_recv hook as it is equivalent to capable()")

 - a new user of it appeared in commit a38f7907b9 ("crypto: Add
   userspace configuration API")

causing no automatic merge conflict, but Eric Paris pointed out the
issue.
2012-01-14 18:36:33 -08:00
Eric Paris
f423e5ba76 capabilities: remove __cap_full_set definition
In 5163b583a0 I removed __cap_full_set but
forgot to remove it from a header.  Do that.

Reported-by: Kornilios Kourtis <kkourt@cslab.ece.ntua.gr>
Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
2012-01-05 18:53:01 -05:00
Eric Paris
f1c84dae0e capabilities: remove task_ns_* functions
task_ in the front of a function, in the security subsystem anyway, means
to me at least, that we are operating with that task as the subject of the
security decision.  In this case what it means is that we are using current as
the subject but we use the task to get the right namespace.  Who in the world
would ever realize that's what task_ns_capability means just by the name?  This
patch eliminates the task_ns functions entirely and uses the has_ns_capability
function instead.  This means we explicitly open code the ns in question in
the caller.  I think it makes the caller a LOT more clear what is going on.

Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
2012-01-05 18:52:59 -05:00
Eric Paris
7b61d64849 capabilites: introduce new has_ns_capabilities_noaudit
For consistency in interfaces, introduce a new interface called
has_ns_capabilities_noaudit.  It checks if the given task has the given
capability in the given namespace.  Use this new function by
has_capabilities_noaudit.

Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
2012-01-05 18:52:57 -05:00
Maciej Żenczykowski
6cc7a765c2 net: allow CAP_NET_RAW to set socket options IP{,V6}_TRANSPARENT
Up till now the IP{,V6}_TRANSPARENT socket options (which actually set
the same bit in the socket struct) have required CAP_NET_ADMIN
privileges to set or clear the option.

- we make clearing the bit not require any privileges.
- we allow CAP_NET_ADMIN to set the bit (as before this change)
- we allow CAP_NET_RAW to set this bit, because raw
  sockets already pretty much effectively allow you
  to emulate socket transparency.

Signed-off-by: Maciej Żenczykowski <maze@google.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
2011-10-20 18:21:36 -04:00
James Morris
434d42cfd0 Merge branch 'next' into for-linus 2011-05-24 22:55:24 +10:00
Linus Torvalds
78c4def67e Merge branch 'timers-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip
* 'timers-core-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/linux-2.6-tip:
  hrtimer: Make lookup table const
  RTC: Disable CONFIG_RTC_CLASS from being built as a module
  timers: Fix alarmtimer build issues when CONFIG_RTC_CLASS=n
  timers: Remove delayed irqwork from alarmtimers implementation
  timers: Improve alarmtimer comments and minor fixes
  timers: Posix interface for alarm-timers
  timers: Introduce in-kernel alarm-timer interface
  timers: Add rb_init_node() to allow for stack allocated rb nodes
  time: Add timekeeping_inject_sleeptime
2011-05-19 17:45:08 -07:00
James Morris
12a5a2621b Merge branch 'master' into next
Conflicts:
	include/linux/capability.h

Manually resolve merge conflict w/ thanks to Stephen Rothwell.

Signed-off-by: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
2011-05-19 18:51:57 +10:00
Serge E. Hallyn
47a150edc2 Cache user_ns in struct cred
If !CONFIG_USERNS, have current_user_ns() defined to (&init_user_ns).

Get rid of _current_user_ns.  This requires nsown_capable() to be
defined in capability.c rather than as static inline in capability.h,
so do that.

Request_key needs init_user_ns defined at current_user_ns if
!CONFIG_USERNS, so forward-declare that in cred.h if !CONFIG_USERNS
at current_user_ns() define.

Compile-tested with and without CONFIG_USERNS.

Signed-off-by: Serge E. Hallyn <serge.hallyn@canonical.com>
[ This makes a huge performance difference for acl_permission_check(),
  up to 30%.  And that is one of the hottest kernel functions for loads
  that are pathname-lookup heavy.  ]
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2011-05-13 11:45:33 -07:00
John Stultz
9a7adcf5c6 timers: Posix interface for alarm-timers
This patch exposes alarm-timers to userland via the posix clock
and timers interface, using two new clockids: CLOCK_REALTIME_ALARM
and CLOCK_BOOTTIME_ALARM. Both clockids behave identically to
CLOCK_REALTIME and CLOCK_BOOTTIME, respectively, but timers
set against the _ALARM suffixed clockids will wake the system if
it is suspended.

Some background can be found here:
	https://lwn.net/Articles/429925/

The concept for Alarm-timers was inspired by the Android Alarm
driver (by Arve Hjønnevåg) found in the Android kernel tree.

See: http://android.git.kernel.org/?p=kernel/common.git;a=blob;f=drivers/rtc/alarm.c;h=1250edfbdf3302f5e4ea6194847c6ef4bb7beb1c;hb=android-2.6.36

While the in-kernel interface is pretty similar between
alarm-timers and Android alarm driver, the user-space interface
for the Android alarm driver is via ioctls to a new char device.
As mentioned above, I've instead chosen to export this functionality
via the posix interface, as it seemed a little simpler and avoids
creating duplicate interfaces to things like CLOCK_REALTIME and
CLOCK_MONOTONIC under alternate names (ie:ANDROID_ALARM_RTC and
ANDROID_ALARM_SYSTEMTIME).

The semantics of the Android alarm driver are different from what
this posix interface provides. For instance, threads other then
the thread waiting on the Android alarm driver are able to modify
the alarm being waited on. Also this interface does not allow
the same wakelock semantics that the Android driver provides
(ie: kernel takes a wakelock on RTC alarm-interupt, and holds it
through process wakeup, and while the process runs, until the
process either closes the char device or calls back in to wait
on a new alarm).

One potential way to implement similar semantics may be via
the timerfd infrastructure, but this needs more research.

There may also need to be some sort of sysfs system level policy
hooks that allow alarm timers to be disabled to keep them
from firing at inappropriate times (ie: laptop in a well insulated
bag, mid-flight).

CC: Arve Hjønnevåg <arve@android.com>
CC: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
CC: Alessandro Zummo <a.zummo@towertech.it>
Acked-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Signed-off-by: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
2011-04-26 14:01:46 -07:00