fork: reorder permissions when violating number of processes limits

When a task is attempting to violate the RLIMIT_NPROC limit we have a
check to see if the task is sufficiently priviledged.  The check first
looks at CAP_SYS_ADMIN, then CAP_SYS_RESOURCE, then if the task is uid=0.

A result is that tasks which are allowed by the uid=0 check are first
checked against the security subsystem.  This results in the security
subsystem auditting a denial for sys_admin and sys_resource and then the
task passing the uid=0 check.

This patch rearranges the code to first check uid=0, since if we pass that
we shouldn't hit the security system at all.  We then check sys_resource,
since it is the smallest capability which will solve the problem.  Lastly
we check the fallback everything cap_sysadmin.  We don't want to give this
capability many places since it is so powerful.

This will eliminate many of the false positive/needless denial messages we
get when a root task tries to violate the nproc limit.  (note that
kthreads count against root, so on a sufficiently large machine we can
actually get past the default limits before any userspace tasks are
launched.)

Signed-off-by: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/fork.c b/kernel/fork.c
index 987b28a1f01b..09dbda38a54b 100644
--- a/kernel/fork.c
+++ b/kernel/fork.c
@@ -1199,8 +1199,8 @@ static struct task_struct *copy_process(unsigned long clone_flags,
         retval = -EAGAIN;
         if (atomic_read(&p->real_cred->user->processes) >=
                         task_rlimit(p, RLIMIT_NPROC)) {
-                if (!capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN) && !capable(CAP_SYS_RESOURCE) &&
-                    p->real_cred->user != INIT_USER)
+                if (p->real_cred->user != INIT_USER &&
+                    !capable(CAP_SYS_RESOURCE) && !capable(CAP_SYS_ADMIN))
                         goto bad_fork_free;
         }
         current->flags &= ~PF_NPROC_EXCEEDED;