Re: [PATCH] remove sys_security

Crispin Cowan
2002-10-18T08:26:00Z

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David S. Miller wrote:

>Anything which passes a completely opaque value through a system
>call is a sign of trouble, design wise.
>
That's interesting. Passing a completely opaque value (actually an
integer) through the system call was exactly what we designed it to do,
because we saw a design need for pecisely that: so that applications
with awareness of a specific module can talk to the module.

Could you elaborate on why this is a sign of trouble, design wise?

>There is simply no way we can enfore proper portable typing by
>all these security module authors such that we can do any kind
>of proper 32-bit/64-bit syscall translation on the ports that
>need to do this.
>
THAT I would love to hear about. If all we have to do to save
sys_security is change its signature, that'd be great.

>If we do things such as the fs stacking or fs filter ideas,
>that eliminates a whole swath of the facilities the security_ops
>"provide". No ugly syscalls passing opaque types through the kernel
>to some magic module, but rather a real facility that is useful
>to many things other than LSM.
>
Yes, that will be wonderful. And the LSM team will be pleased to re-work
the desing when stackable file systems appear and we can take advantage
of them.

Crispin

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