Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN, sort of

70 points by ysun

HN discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48988793

Rovanion

Here is an expanation of what $ORIGIN means.

addison

This seems extremely heavy-handed. eBPF is still quite version-unstable and I can see this causing a lot of headache. In a context like nix, where there is an explicit local build, this is at least distributable, but my experience with eBPF makes me very wary to deploy something like this.

k749gtnc9l3w

I guess the catch is that with eBPF you still cannot have a fully relocatable binary without root on the most popular distributions?

lcapaldo

If it is in the VFS you still need root to upgrade to a kernel with the feature.

In the hypothetical where it was in the VFS I am not sure we should be convinced various distributions wouldn’t disable it if it were configurable or patch it out.
- k749gtnc9l3w
  
  upgrade to a kernel with the feature
  
  Well, this does happen in medium term
  
  I am not sure we should be convinced various distributions wouldn’t disable it if it were configurable or patch it out.
  
  Not clear either way, but I mean, it less of a mess than unprivileged containers, so maybe?
  
  (Of course unprivileged containers allow a different way around the issue, if they are not disabled)
ibookstein

Catch with binfmt_misc as well, no?
- k749gtnc9l3w
  
  Indeed. I meant the catch in comparison with VFS naively accepting $ORIGIN.
  - pgeorgi
    
    It's set up once (presumably: init script or whatever) and then binfmt_misc does the processing everywhere, no?
    
    k749gtnc9l3w
    
    Yes; the question is more about setups where you can do whatever does not require root (and expected to build and install-in-$HOME some software)