[kernel-hardening] Re: [PATCH v2012.1] fs: symlink restrictions on sticky directories

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Jan 2012 11:05:20 +0100 Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> 
> > * Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > Maybe true for a general purpose computer, but someone who 
> > > is making a single-purpose device such as a digital TV or 
> > > a wifi router won't want it.
> > 
> > That's the case for 99% of the features and semantics we 
> > have: by definition a single-purpose device uses only a 
> > small sub-set of an infinite purpose OS, right?
> > 
> > Still we only modularize semantics out if they easily fit 
> > into some existing plug-in/module concept, if the feature is 
> > arguably oddball that a sizable portion of people want to 
> > disable, or if it makes notable sense for size reasons. To 
> > me it looked distinctly silly to complicate things for such 
> > a small piece of code.
> 
> We're talking tens or hundreds of millions of machines for 
> which the patch is a straightforward speed and space 
> regression.  Fixing this needs just a little Kconfig twiddling 
> and a #else clause.  We may as well do it.

No strong objections from me.

> > I doubt Kees would mind modularizing it, but it would be nice to 
> > get VFS maintainer feedback in the:
> > 
> >    { 'you are crazy, over my dead body' ... 'cool, merge it' }
> > 
> > continuous spectrum of possible answers.
> 
> Well yes.  We'll get there.
> 
> Alas, I've become rather slack in my maintainer patchbombing 
> in the past year or two.  It's just boring and depressing to 
> spray patches at maintainers and have 90% or more of them 
> simply ignored. [...]

How about just sending it to Linus after the first ignored patch 
[perhaps marked in a special way, to make Linus aware of the 
out-of-band nature of the patches], instead of buffering them 
indefinitely and increasing your overhead all around?

We'll no doubt regret some of those patches going upstream, but 
that's OK i think, this is an exception mechanism.

> [...] I'm sitting on 45 such patches at present so I suppose I 
> should get off my tail and do a respray.

(If I missed any then let me know.)

Thanks,

	Ingo