Linux Capabilities
External
Internal
Overview
Traditional UNIX implementations distinguish two categories of processes for the purpose of performing permission checks: privileged processes and unprivileged processes. A privileged process is a process with its effective user ID is 0, referred to as superuser or root. An unprivileged process is a process with a non-zero its effective user ID. Privileged processes bypass all kernel permission checks, while unprivileged processes are subject to full permission checking based on the process' credentials: effective UID, effective GID and supplementary group list.
Starting with kernel 2.2, Linux divides the privileges traditionally associated with superuser into distinct units, known as Linux (or kernel) capabilities, which can be independently enabled and disabled. Capabilities are a per-thread attribute.