Re: [PATCH] remove sys_security

Crispin Cowan
2002-10-18T07:55:04Z

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David S. Miller wrote:

>There is a very important fundamental difference to the USB case.
>It eats zero space in my kernel when I have no USB devices.
>CONFIG_USB=m works as designed!
>
>CONFIG_SECURITY=m still does not exist, so distribution makers have to
>make a y vs. n choice.
>
This was our design goal for LSM: to be as minimally intrusive to the
kernel as possible. We would LOVE to have a zero-footprint solution that
allowed users to enable LSM when they need it. More precisely, LSM is
that mechanism intended to impose as little overhead as possible with no
modules loaded, and provide adequate access to the modules when they are
loaded.

LSM is not zero-footprint, but it is as low as we could make it. We are
interested in ways to reduce the footprint, but that reduction needs to
be looked at in cost/benefit terms: changes that have very little impact
on footprint, but high impact on the functionality of the LSM interface.
If you remove this system call, you will save almost nothing in kernel
resources, but do a lot of damage to functionality.

On the other hand, the complaints about the typing of the arguments are
well taken, in the context of 32/64-bit porting issues. So what types
should the arguments be? Abstractly, they are integers, in the
mathematical sense. What is the preferred word-size-portalbe way to
express that?

Crispin

--
Crispin Cowan, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist, WireX http://wirex.com/~crispin/
Security Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org
Available for purchase: http://wirex.com/Products/Immunix/purchase.html

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