Re: [PATCH v1 1/2] PCI/sysfs: Change read permissions for VPD attributes

[Leon Romanovsky <leon@kernel.org>]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2024 at 07:44:09AM +0100, Heiner Kallweit wrote:
> On 12.11.2024 01:34, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Nov 2024 14:41:04 -0600
> > Bjorn Helgaas <helgaas@kernel.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> On Thu, Nov 07, 2024 at 08:56:56PM +0200, Leon Romanovsky wrote:
> >>> From: Leon Romanovsky <leonro@nvidia.com>
> >>>
> >>> The Vital Product Data (VPD) attribute is not readable by regular
> >>> user without root permissions. Such restriction is not really needed
> >>> for many devices in the world, as data presented in that VPD is not
> >>> sensitive and access to the HW is safe and tested.
> >>>
> >>> This change aligns the permissions of the VPD attribute to be accessible
> >>> for read by all users, while write being restricted to root only.
> >>>
> >>> For the driver, there is a need to opt-in in order to allow this
> >>> functionality.  
> >>
> >> I don't think the use case is very strong (and not included at all
> >> here).
> >>
> >> If we do need to do this, I think it's a property of the device, not
> >> the driver.
> > 
> > I remember some broken PCI devices, which will crash if VPD is read.
> > Probably not worth opening this can of worms.
> 
> These crashes shouldn't occur any longer. There are two problematic cases:
> 1. Reading past end of VPD
>    This used to crash certain devices and was fixed by stop reading at
>    the VPD end tag.
> 2. Accessing VPD if device firmware isn't correctly loaded and initialized
>    This affects certain LSI devices, which are blacklisted so that PCI core
>    prevents VPD access.

Thanks for the information.

Bjorn,

After this response, do you still think that v0 [1] is not the right way
to change the read permission?

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/65791906154e3e5ea12ea49127cf7c707325ca56.1730102428.git.leonro@nvidia.com/

>