Re: [PATCH] Increase recursive symlink limit from 5 to 8

[mru@kth.se (Måns Rullgård)]

GOTO Masanori <gotom@debian.or.jp> writes:

> At Sun, 11 Jan 2004 10:49:30 +0100,
> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>> > 6 does seem pretty low.  What was the reason for setting it there?  Is
>> > there a downside to increasing it?
>> 
>> It was reduced down from 8 because it can lead to stack overflows.
>> Recursive links like this usually point at a quite broken filesystem
>> setup too afaik.
>
> But I still think 6 is too small from user level point of view, as
> Petter wrote.  The example is /usr/lib library links.  I got bug
> report which complained that a library want to use "bounce" link:
>
> 	/usr/lib/liba -> /etc/alternatives/liba -> /usr/lib/another/libb.
>
> If .so file uses major.minor scheme, then /usr/lib/liba.so links:
>
> 	/usr/lib/liba.so -> /usr/lib/liba.so.2 -> /usr/lib/liba.so.2.3
>
> and so on.  It can easily exceed 6 symlinks.  I think the correct fix
> is to make VFS not to overflow stacks.  Is it allowable change?

One of the reasons for the limit is that it doesn't require any
special detection of circular links.

-- 
Måns Rullgård
mru@kth.se