Re: [capabilities] Allow normal inheritance for a configurable set of capabilities

Mimi Zohar
2015-02-02T18:48:12Z

On Mon, 2015-02-02 at 18:08 +0000, Serge Hallyn wrote:
> Quoting Casey Schaufler (casey@schaufler-ca.com):
> > I'm game to participate in such an effort. The POSIX scheme
> > is workable, but given that it's 20 years old and hasn't
> > developed real traction it's hard to call it successful.
>
> Over the years we've several times discussed possible reasons for this
> and how to help. I personally think it's two things: 1. lack of
> toolchain and fs support. The fact that we cannot to this day enable
> ping using capabilities by default because of cpio, tar and non-xattr
> filesystems is disheartening.

We're working on resolving the CPIO issue. tar currently supports
xattrs. At this point, how many non-xattr filesystems are there really?

Mimi

> 2. It's hard for users and applications
> to know what caps they need. yes the API is a bear to use, but we can
> hide that behind fancier libraries. But using capabilities requires too
> much in-depth knowledge of precisely what caps you might need for
> whatever operations library may now do when you asked for something.
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