From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1752612Ab0LVXCh (ORCPT ); Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:02:37 -0500 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:33050 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751394Ab0LVXCg (ORCPT ); Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:02:36 -0500 Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2010 15:02:09 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Amerigo Wang Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Neil Horman , WANG Cong , Frederic Weisbecker , Wu Fengguang , Dan Carpenter , Tejun Heo Subject: Re: [RFC Patch] kcore: restrict access to the whole memory Message-Id: <20101222150209.8e18afa7.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <1293016926-1714-1-git-send-email-amwang@redhat.com> References: <1293016926-1714-1-git-send-email-amwang@redhat.com> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.0.2 (GTK+ 2.20.1; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:21:59 +0800 Amerigo Wang wrote: > This patch restricts /proc/kcore from accessing the whole memory, > instead, only an ELF header can be read. > > The initial patch was done by Vivek. Getting a bit tired of this. Are we supposed to be mind-readers? How else are we to work out why you think Linux needs this feature? What problems it solves? What applications are expected to break and what the breakage patterns are? Why the benefits are worth the maintenance costs and the risk of breakage? Why it's done with a config option and not a boot-time or runtime tunable? c'mon, you guys have been around long enough to understand this stuff.