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nullfs provides a permanently empty and immutable directory. Lookups
fail with ENOENT. The directory can be opened, read, stat, mounted upon.
It behaves like nothing is there.
Add its counterpart failfs where the semantics are not "there is
nothing here" but "nothing is supported here". Every operation that
reaches the filesystem fails with EOPNOTSUPP. Even statfs()/fstatfs()
fail so the filesystem cannot be discovered through an fd to it.
EOPNOTSUPP rather than a permission errno keeps that coherent. There
is no permission model in which anything could ever be allowed and
EACCES or EPERM would merely suggest that different credentials might
succeed while EIO would suggest corruption. It also makes hitting the
failfs boundary mostly quite dinstinguishable. A task anchoring its
lookups at real directory file descriptors may be able to tell a failfs
refusal from an ordinary permission failure. I wouldn't go so far as
guaranteeing that but it should mostly work.
No path lookup can open the root, not even with O_PATH. It is never
reached by a lookup in a parent directory. The only way to a path-walk
terminal at the root is a jump through a /proc/<pid>/{root,cwd} magic
link or by mountpoint traversal. The root also refuses
->d_weak_revalidate() which the VFS calls for jumped terminals. That
covers the jump-based references too: an O_PATH open is refused,
name_to_handle_at() cannot encode it into a file handle, and following a
magic link into it fails. A plain readlink() of such a link still works
and shows "failfs:/".
There is a single instance of failfs mounted during early boot via
kern_mount() making it logically distinct from every mount namespace.
Since the mount is a member of no mount namespace mounting onto it
fails. So nothing can ever be mounted on top of it. It cannot be cloned
via OPEN_TREE_CLONE and it does not show up in statmount()/listmount()
or /proc/<pid>/mountinfo. The filesystem is not registered so it is
not visible in /proc/filesystems and cannot be mounted from userspace.
This lets tasks shed their filesystem state completely. A process with
its root directory or working directory in failfs must anchor every path
lookup at an explicit file descriptor or is doomed to fail any lookup.
Absolute paths, absolute symlinks, and AT_FDCWD-relative lookups
simply fail. Followup patches will expose it via a new FD_FAILFS_ROOT
file descriptor sentinel understood by fchdir() and the new fchroot()
system call.
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260724-work-failfs-v2-1-485dabbae185@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Christian Brauner (Amutable) <brauner@kernel.org>
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