Re: [MAINTAINERS/KERNEL SUMMIT] Trust and maintenance of file systems

Steven Rostedt
2023-09-07T02:51:26Z

On Thu, 7 Sep 2023 12:22:43 +1000
Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com> wrote:

> > Anyway, what about just having read-only be the minimum for supporting a
> > file system? We can say "sorry, due to no one maintaining this file system,
> > we will no longer allow write access." But I'm guessing that just
> > supporting reading an old file system is much easier than modifying one
> > (wasn't that what we did with NTFS for the longest time?)
>
> "Read only" doesn't mean the filesytsem implementation is in any way
> secure, robust or trustworthy - the kernel is still parsing
> untrusted data in ring 0 using unmaintained, bit-rotted, untested
> code....

It's just a way to still easily retrieve it, than going through and looking
for those old ISOs that still might exist on the interwebs. I wouldn't
recommend anyone actually having that code enabled on a system that doesn't
need access to one of those file systems.

I guess the point I'm making is, what's the burden in keeping it around in
the read-only state? It shouldn't require any updates for new features,
which is the complaint I believe Willy was having.

-- Steve