Disable symlinks: use O_PATH to open path components. It was introduced in Linux 2.6.39, glibc 2.14 and allows to obtain file descriptors without actually opening files. Thus made it possible to traverse path with openat() syscalls without the need to have read permissions for path components. It is effectively emulates O_SEARCH which is missing on Linux. O_PATH is used in combination with O_RDONLY. The last one is ignored if O_PATH is used, but it allows nginx to not fail when it was built on modern system (i.e. glibc 2.14+) and run with a kernel older than 2.6.39. Then O_PATH is unknown to the kernel and ignored, while O_RDONLY is used. Sadly, fstat() is not working with O_PATH descriptors till Linux 3.6. As a workaround we fallback to fstatat() with the AT_EMPTY_PATH flag that was introduced at the same time as O_PATH.

--- a/src/os/unix/ngx_files.h
+++ b/src/os/unix/ngx_files.h
@@ -91,6 +91,9 @@ typedef struct {
 #elif defined(O_EXEC)
 #define NGX_FILE_SEARCH          (O_EXEC|NGX_FILE_DIRECTORY)
 
+#elif (NGX_HAVE_O_PATH)
+#define NGX_FILE_SEARCH          (O_PATH|O_RDONLY|NGX_FILE_DIRECTORY)
+
 #else
 #define NGX_FILE_SEARCH          (O_RDONLY|NGX_FILE_DIRECTORY)
 #endif