https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Proposals/GroupMerging
== Justification ==
It is common today for users to rely on centrally-managed user stores for
handling their user accounts. However, much software existing today does
not have an innate understanding of such accounts. Instead, they commonly
rely on membership in known groups for managing access-control (for
example the "wheel" group on Fedora and RHEL systems or the "adm" group
on Debian-derived systems). In the present incarnation of nsswitch, the
only way to have such groups managed by a remote user store such as
FreeIPA or Active Directory would be to manually remove the groups from
/etc/group on the clients so that nsswitch would then move past nss_files
and into the SSSD, nss-ldap or other remote user database.
== Solution ==
With this patch, a new action is introduced for nsswitch:
NSS_ACTION_MERGE. To take advantage of it, one will add [SUCCESS=merge]
between two database entries in the nsswitch.conf file. When a group is
located in the first of the two group entries, processing will continue
on to the next one. If the group is also found in the next entry (and the
group name and GID are an exact match), the member list of the second
entry will be added to the group object to be returned.
== Implementation ==
After each DL_LOOKUP_FN() returns, the next action is checked. If the
function returned NSS_STATUS_SUCCESS and the next action is
NSS_ACTION_MERGE, a copy of the result buffer is saved for the next pass
through the loop. If on this next pass through the loop the database
returns another instance of a group matching both the group name and GID,
the member list is added to the previous list and it is returned as a
single object. If the following database does not contain the same group,
then the original is copied back into the destination buffer.
This patch implements merge functionality only for the group database.
For other databases, there is a default implementation that will return
the EINVAL errno if a merge is requested. The merge functionality can be
implemented for other databases at a later time if such is needed. Each
database must provide a unique implementation of the deep-copy and merge
functions.
If [SUCCESS=merge] is present in nsswitch.conf for a glibc version that
does not support it, glibc will process results up until that operation,
at which time it will return results if it has found them or else will
simply return an error. In practical terms, this ends up behaving like
the remainder of the nsswitch.conf line does not exist.
== Iterators ==
This feature does not modify the iterator functionality from its current
behavior. If getgrnam() or getgrgid() is called, glibc will iterate
through all entries in the `group` line in nsswitch.conf and display the
list of members without attempting to merge them. This is consistent with
the behavior of nss_files where if two separate lines are specified for
the same group in /etc/groups, getgrnam()/getgrgid() will display both.
Clients are already expected to handle this gracefully.
== No Premature Optimizations ==
The following is a list of places that might be eligible for
optimization, but were not overengineered for this initial contribution:
* Any situation where a merge may occur will result in one malloc() of
the same size as the input buffer.
* Any situation where a merge does occur will result in a second
malloc() to hold the list of pointers to member name strings.
* The list of members is simply concatenated together and is not tested
for uniqueness (which is identical to the behavior for nss_files,
which will simply return identical values if they both exist on the
line in the file. This could potentially be optimized to reduce space
usage in the buffer, but it is both complex and computationally
expensive to do so.
== Testing ==
I performed testing by running the getent utility against my newly-built
glibc and configuring /etc/nsswitch.conf with the following entry:
group: group: files [SUCCESS=merge] sss
In /etc/group I included the line:
wheel❌10:sgallagh
I then configured my local SSSD using the id_provider=local to respond
with:
wheel:*:10:localuser,localuser2
I then ran `getent group wheel` against the newly-built glibc in
multiple situations and received the expected output as described
above:
* When SSSD was running.
* When SSSD was configured in nsswitch.conf but the daemon was not
running.
* When SSSD was configured in nsswitch.conf but nss_sss.so.2 was not
installed on the system.
* When the order of 'sss' and 'files' was reversed.
* All of the above with the [SUCCESS=merge] removed (to ensure no
regressions).
* All of the above with `getent group 10`.
* All of the above with `getent group` with and without
`enumerate=true` set in SSSD.
* All of the above with and without nscd enabled on the system.
This directory contains the sources of the GNU C Library.
See the file "version.h" for what release version you have.
The GNU C Library is the standard system C library for all GNU systems,
and is an important part of what makes up a GNU system. It provides the
system API for all programs written in C and C-compatible languages such
as C++ and Objective C; the runtime facilities of other programming
languages use the C library to access the underlying operating system.
In GNU/Linux systems, the C library works with the Linux kernel to
implement the operating system behavior seen by user applications.
In GNU/Hurd systems, it works with a microkernel and Hurd servers.
The GNU C Library implements much of the POSIX.1 functionality in the
GNU/Hurd system, using configurations i[4567]86-*-gnu. The current
GNU/Hurd support requires out-of-tree patches that will eventually be
incorporated into an official GNU C Library release.
When working with Linux kernels, this version of the GNU C Library
requires Linux kernel version 3.2 or later on all architectures except
i[4567]86 and x86_64, where Linux kernel version 2.6.32 or later
suffices.
Also note that the shared version of the libgcc_s library must be
installed for the pthread library to work correctly.
The GNU C Library supports these configurations for using Linux kernels:
aarch64*-*-linux-gnu
alpha*-*-linux-gnu
arm-*-linux-gnueabi
hppa-*-linux-gnu Not currently functional without patches.
i[4567]86-*-linux-gnu
x86_64-*-linux-gnu Can build either x86_64 or x32
ia64-*-linux-gnu
m68k-*-linux-gnu
microblaze*-*-linux-gnu
mips-*-linux-gnu
mips64-*-linux-gnu
powerpc-*-linux-gnu Hardware or software floating point, BE only.
powerpc64*-*-linux-gnu Big-endian and little-endian.
s390-*-linux-gnu
s390x-*-linux-gnu
sh[34]-*-linux-gnu
sparc*-*-linux-gnu
sparc64*-*-linux-gnu
tilegx-*-linux-gnu
tilepro-*-linux-gnu
If you are interested in doing a port, please contact the glibc
maintainers; see http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/ for more
information.
See the file INSTALL to find out how to configure, build, and install
the GNU C Library. You might also consider reading the WWW pages for
the C library at http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/.
The GNU C Library is (almost) completely documented by the Texinfo manual
found in the `manual/' subdirectory. The manual is still being updated
and contains some known errors and omissions; we regret that we do not
have the resources to work on the manual as much as we would like. For
corrections to the manual, please file a bug in the `manual' component,
following the bug-reporting instructions below. Please be sure to check
the manual in the current development sources to see if your problem has
already been corrected.
Please see http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/bugs.html for bug reporting
information. We are now using the Bugzilla system to track all bug reports.
This web page gives detailed information on how to report bugs properly.
The GNU C Library is free software. See the file COPYING.LIB for copying
conditions, and LICENSES for notices about a few contributions that require
these additional notices to be distributed. License copyright years may be
listed using range notation, e.g., 1996-2015, indicating that every year in
the range, inclusive, is a copyrightable year that would otherwise be listed
individually.
ced8f89336