Re: [PATCH v5] init: Disable defaults if init= fails

Andy Lutomirski
2014-10-14T21:21:32Z

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:00 PM, Andrew Morton
<akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Oct 2014 11:13:14 -0700 Andy Lutomirski <luto@amacapital.net> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Oct 1, 2014 at 11:05 AM, <josh@joshtriplett.org> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 09:53:56PM -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
>> >> I significantly prefer default N. Scripts that play with init= really
>> >> don't want the fallback, and I can imagine contexts in which it could
>> >> be a security problem.
>> >
>> > While I certainly would prefer the non-fallback behavior for init as
>> > well, standard kernel practice has typically been to use "default y" for
>> > previously built-in features that become configurable. And I'd
>> > certainly prefer a compile-time configuration option like this (even
>> > with default y) over a "strictinit" kernel command-line option.
>> >
>>
>> Fair enough.
>>
>> So: "default y" for a release or two, then switch the default? Having
>> default y will annoy virtme, though it's not the end of the world.
>> Virtme is intended to work with more-or-less-normal kernels.
>>
>
> Adding another Kconfig option is tiresome. What was wrong with strictinit=?

The consensus seems to be that adding a non-default option to get
sensible behavior would be unfortunate. Also, I don't like
strictinit=, since backwards-compatible setups will have to do
init=foo strictinit=foo. My original proposal was init=foo
strictinit.

TBH, my preference would be to make strict mode unconditional.
http://xkcd.com/1172/

--Andy

--
Andy Lutomirski
AMA Capital Management, LLC