From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 13:33:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 13:33:07 -0400 Received: from runyon.cygnus.com ([205.180.230.5]:2286 "EHLO cygnus.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Thu, 14 Jun 2001 13:32:52 -0400 Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 10:32:49 -0700 From: Richard Henderson To: Andrea Arcangeli Cc: Linus Torvalds , Ingo Molnar , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: unregistered changes to the user<->kernel API Message-ID: <20010614103249.A28852@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <20010614191219.A30567@athlon.random> <20010614191634.B30567@athlon.random> <20010614192122.C30567@athlon.random> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20010614192122.C30567@athlon.random>; from andrea@suse.de on Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 07:21:22PM +0200 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, Jun 14, 2001 at 07:21:22PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote: > Richard are you sure we can break O_NOFOLLOW and still expect the machine to > boot? [uses in glibc] Yes, I saw those. What is the effect of O_NOFOLLOW? To not follow symbolic links when opening the file. If you open a regular file, in effect nothing happens. Moreover, if these opens were not finding files now, the system wouldn't work. So: the effect, I suppose, is (1) disabling some security within glibc, and (2) making these accesses slower since they will be considered O_DIRECT after the change. Which doesn't seem that life-threatening to me. r~