Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757033Ab2JDNfO (ORCPT ); Thu, 4 Oct 2012 09:35:14 -0400 Received: from mx.scalarmail.ca ([98.158.95.75]:54483 "EHLO ironport-01.sms.scalar.ca" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756866Ab2JDNfL (ORCPT ); Thu, 4 Oct 2012 09:35:11 -0400 Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2012 09:35:04 -0400 From: Nick Bowler To: Linus Torvalds Cc: Kees Cook , "Theodore Ts'o" , Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: Linux 3.6 Message-ID: <20121004133504.GA5599@elliptictech.com> References: <20121003194614.GA2893@elliptictech.com> <20121003200515.GZ9092@outflux.net> <20121003204141.GB6026@thunk.org> <20121003204919.GA9092@outflux.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Organization: Elliptic Technologies Inc. User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1997 Lines: 43 On 2012-10-03 13:54 -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Kees Cook wrote: > > I think the benefits of this being on by default outweigh glitches > > like this. Based on Nick's email, it looks like a directory tree of his > > own creation. > > I agree that *one* report like this doesn't necessarily mean that we > need to turn it off, if Nick is happy to just fix up his script and > it's all local. > > However, I suspect we'll see more. And once that happens, we're not > going to keep a default that breaks peoples old scripts, and we're > going to have to rely on distributions (or users) explicitly setting > it. Yes, it is a directory of my own creation, intended as a place for users (read: me) to stick stuff on the local disk as opposed to on NFS. It's pretty trivial for me to fixup everything to not need this symlink anymore (and I suspect it is the only offender); I just created the symlink in the first place so that I wouldn't have to change anything else. (While on /this/ machine I created the directory, I have used shared lab machines with a similar setup). The thing that bothers me most about all this is that it's basically impossible to see why things are failing without digging through the git tree or posting to the mailing list (or recalling earlier mailing list discussions about the restriction, as I vaguely do now). You just suddenly get "permission denied" errors when all the permissions involved look fine. As far as I know, the owner, group and mode of symlinks have always been completely meaningless. Upgrade to 3.6, and they're suddenly meaningful in extremely non-obvious ways. Cheers, -- Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/