Re: Add PGM protocol support to the IP stack

[David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>]

From: Andi Kleen <andi@firstfloor.org>
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:18:36 +0100

> Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org> writes:
>>
>> I know about the openpgm implementation. Openpbm does this at the user
>> level and requires linking to a library. It is essentially a communication
>> protocol done in user space. It has privilege issues because it has to
>> create PGM packets via a raw socket.
> 
> That seems like a poor reason alone to put something into the kernel
> Perhaps you rather need some way to have unpriviledged raw sockets?
> 
> The classical way to do this is to start suid root, only open
> the socket and then drop privileges.

I completely agree.

We should be able to make a way for unprivileged users to
use RAW sockets in some limited capacity, for cases like this.

But I also don't consider what openpbm has to do right now to
be all that much of a restriction.  You need privileges to
add the protocol to the kernel, you need privileges to run
the userspace variant, there is no real difference.