Ins and Outs of Inputs

First a bold note. I already have repository on Gentoo infrastructure for working on my GSoC project. Check it out if you want.

Last time I mentioned I won't go into technical details of my GSoC project any more on this blog. For that you can keep an eye on my project on gentooexperimental and/or gentoo mailing lists, namely gentoo-qa and gentoo-soc. But there is one interesting thing I found out while working on Collagen.

One part of my project was automation of creating of chroot environment for compiling packages. For this I created simple shell script that you can see in my repository. I will pick out one line out of previous version of this script:

mount -o bind,ro "$DIR1" "$DIR2"

What does this line do? Or more specifically what should it do? It should create a virtual copy of conents of directory DIR1 inside directory DIR2. Copy in DIR2 should be read-only, that means no creating new files, no changing of files and so on. This command succeeds and we as far as we know everything should work OK right? Wrong!

Command mentioned above actually fails silently. There is a bug in current linux kernels (2.6.30 as of this day). When you execure mount with "-o bind,ro" as arguments, the "ro" part is silently ignored. Unfortunately it is added to /etc/mtab even if it was ignored. Therefore you would not see that DIR2 is writable unless you tried writing to it yourself. Current proper way to create read-only bind mounts is therefore this:

mount -o bind "$DIR1" "$DIR2"
mount -o remount,ro "$DIR2"

There is issue of race conditions with this approach, but in most situations that should not be a problem. You can find more information about read-only bind mounts in LWN article about the topic.