Re: [PATCH 2/2] block: create ioctl to discard-or-zeroout a range of blocks

Theodore Ts'o
2016-03-12T07:20:16Z

On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 04:44:16PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 4:35 PM, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> >
> > At the end of the day it's about whether you trust the userspace
> > program or not.
>
> There's a big difference between "give the user rope", and "tie the
> rope in a noose and put a banana peel so that the user might stumble
> into the rope and hang himself", though.

So let's see. The user application has to explicitly request
NO_HIDE_STALE via an fallocate flag --- so it requires changing the
source code and recompiling the application. And then, the system
administrator has to pass in a mount option specifying a group that
the application has to run under. And then the application has to run
setgid with that group's privileges.

I hardly think that can be considered handing the user a pre-tied
noose.

Sure, the application can do something stupid --- but I'd arguing
giving root to some junior sysadmin is far more likely to cause
problems.

Cheers,

- Ted