Re: unregistered changes to the user<->kernel API

Richard Henderson
2001-06-14T17:33:17Z

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~