Re: patches to move sys_getfh to vfs_syscalls.c?

[Artur Grabowski <art@stacken.kth.se>]

Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org> writes:

> > b) introduces the new system calls fhopen, fhstat, fhstatfs that are
> > like open but with a file handle instead of a file name.
> 
> What permission checking happens on these?  Isn't this inherently
> a localhost security hole, if you were to walk the filehandle space?

root-only.

> I'm not getting a good description of WHY this needs to happen.

NetBSD and FreeBSD already has them. xfs already implements their own variants
of them. It's really useful for applications that store a lot of files and
don't need care about their names (web caches, news servers, Arla, Coda, etc.).
This way we save them the effort of lookup (very expensive operation) and save
the name cache for those who need it.

//art