kernfs: Send IN_DELETE_SELF and IN_IGNORED

Currently some kernfs files (e.g. cgroup.events, memory.events) support
inotify watches for IN_MODIFY, but unlike with regular filesystems, they
do not receive IN_DELETE_SELF or IN_IGNORED events when they are
removed. This means inotify watches persist after file deletion until
the process exits and the inotify file descriptor is cleaned up, or
until inotify_rm_watch is called manually.

This creates a problem for processes monitoring cgroups. For example, a
service monitoring memory.events for memory.high breaches needs to know
when a cgroup is removed to clean up its state. Where it's known that a
cgroup is removed when all processes die, without IN_DELETE_SELF the
service must resort to inefficient workarounds such as:
  1) Periodically scanning procfs to detect process death (wastes CPU
     and is susceptible to PID reuse).
  2) Holding a pidfd for every monitored cgroup (can exhaust file
     descriptors).

This patch enables IN_DELETE_SELF and IN_IGNORED events for kernfs files
and directories by clearing inode i_nlink values during removal. This
allows VFS to make the necessary fsnotify calls so that userspace
receives the inotify events.

As a result, applications can rely on a single existing watch on a file
of interest (e.g. memory.events) to receive notifications for both
modifications and the eventual removal of the file, as well as automatic
watch descriptor cleanup, simplifying userspace logic and improving
efficiency.

There is gap in this implementation for certain file removals due their
unique nature in kernfs. Directory removals that trigger file removals
occur through vfs_rmdir, which shrinks the dcache and emits fsnotify
events after the rmdir operation; there is no issue here. However kernfs
writes to particular files (e.g. cgroup.subtree_control) can also cause
file removal, but vfs_write does not attempt to emit fsnotify events
after the write operation, even if i_nlink counts are 0. As a usecase
for monitoring this category of file removals is not known, they are
left without having IN_DELETE or IN_DELETE_SELF events generated.
Fanotify recursive monitoring also does not work for kernfs nodes that
do not have inodes attached, as they are created on-demand in kernfs.

Suggested-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: T.J. Mercier <tjmercier@google.com>
Tested-by: syzbot@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Acked-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260225223404.783173-3-tjmercier@google.com
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions