Re: [Bug #14474] restorecond going crazy on 2.6.31.4 - inotify regression?

Rafael J. Wysocki
2009-10-28T18:47:31Z

On Wednesday 28 October 2009, jim owens wrote:
> Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Tuesday 27 October 2009, Eric Paris wrote:
> >> It's a restorecond bug. restorecon acted as if watch descriptors
> >> could never be reused. They weren't on old kernels and it's possible
> >> they are reused now. Restorecon was fixed.
> >>
> >> http://marc.info/?l=selinux&m=125380417916233&w=2
> >>
> >> a change in the kernel caused a buggy userspace program to break. I
> >> know how to put the kernel back the way it was, but I don't know if we
> >> call this a regression, you guys tell me.
> >
> > Yes, we do, AFAICS. The policy is not to break user space, even if it happens
> > to work by accident.
>
> But if we make a rule of "never break even bad user programs" then
> we also should never plug security holes because that breaks a
> user program expecting that attack vector :)

Well, that's why this rule is not carved in stone.

Clearly, there are some cases in which we can't afford keeping the buggy user
space happy, not only security-related.

Thanks,
Rafael