On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 05:10:41AM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 05:01, Andrea Righi wrote:
> > On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 10:14:53AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
> >> On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 11:35:27PM +0200, Andrea Righi wrote:
> >> > This functionality can be used by all the applications that want to have 
> >> > a
> >> > better control over the page cache management (for example to 
> >> > immediately drop
> >> > pages that for sure will not be reused in the near future, without 
> >> > calling
> >> > posix_fadvise() for all the files they've touched), or to provide a more 
> >> > fine
> >> > grained debugging feature usable by the filesystem benchmarks.
> >> >
> >> > The system call does not require root privileges and it can be called by 
> >> > any
> >> > unprivileged application. For example, we can write a userspace tool to 
> >> > run
> >> > something like this:
> >> >
> >> >   $ drop-pagecache /path/file_or_dir
> >>
> >> That's a potential DOS vector, I think. Drop the pagecache in a hard
> >> loop on the root fs of a busy server and watch it crawl...
> >
> > Yes, probably we could allow only the CAP_SYS_ADMIN tasks to execute
> > this syscall.
> 
> if /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches has any checks other than file permission
> checks (i.e. UID==0), it'd probably be better to copy those rather
> than picking something different.

ok, what about checking current_euid() == 0?

Thanks,
-Andrea
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