Re: PING^7 (was Re: [PATCH v2 00/14] Corrections and customization of the SG_IO command whitelist (CVE-2012-4542))

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@redhat.com>]

Il 22/05/2013 20:11, Theodore Ts'o ha scritto:
> On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 07:00:14PM +0200, Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>> You have hardware providers selling cloud services that want to run
>> their own custom backup services from within a VM, which entails having
>> vendor-specific commands run from within a VM.  Or you have people that
>> run clusters that are half-physical and half-virtual and want to use the
>> same /dev/disk/by-id paths in both cases; perhaps, with NPIV, they want
>> to use one zoning approach for both physical and virtual machines.
>> Someone else they want to backup to tapes from a VM (for example s390
>> people who just put everything in a VM, so the distinction of physical
>> and virtual makes no sense for them).  Some people use virtual machines
>> as sandboxes, and want to burn the ISOs from the same VMs where they
>> download the ISOs.  Some people have vendor utilities that only run
>> under Windows, and want to run them in a VM.
> 
> So is this hypothetical or do you have a real customer in mind?

All of these come from real customers.

> If it's not theoretical, how does the cloud service control who has
> access to the CD burner, and how are the disks loaded into the CD
> burner?

CD burning would be used in a VM that runs on your local workstation, so
the VM gets access to the CD burner under your desk.  There was also a
developer of a CD burning tool that wanted to test it inside BSD,
Solaris and Windows VMs; the idea is the same.

Paolo