Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S965482Ab2JZRW4 (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:22:56 -0400 Received: from mail-we0-f174.google.com ([74.125.82.174]:61236 "EHLO mail-we0-f174.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S965377Ab2JZRWy (ORCPT ); Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:22:54 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: References: From: Linus Torvalds Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:22:32 -0700 X-Google-Sender-Auth: Zuqvb2QAtnjnwrk_Ab7vZ569TC0 Message-ID: Subject: Re: Enabling hardlink restrictions to the Linux VFS in 3.6 by default To: Holger Kiehl Cc: linux-kernel , Nick Bowler , Kees Cook , Ingo Molnar , Andrew Morton , Al Viro , Alan Cox , "Theodore Ts'o" Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1534 Lines: 34 On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 5:13 AM, Holger Kiehl wrote: > > as of linux 3.6 hardlink restrictions to the Linux VFS have been enabled > by default. This breaks the application AFD [1] of which I am the author. Ok, we had a previous report of breakage, but that was just local scripting. Since that was just a single user (Nick Bowler), and he was ok with just fixing his setup, I let it go, waiting to see if anybody else reacted. There may well have been other users that had odd breakage, but didn't realize what the cause was. Regardless, clearly this does break things, and as such needs to be undone. We do not cause regressions that people notice in the kernel. So I've defaulted these things to off, and marked it for stable. See commit 561ec64ae67e ("VFS: don't do protected {sym,hard}links by default"). Either distributions can enable it with some security setting (along with the other security things they do, like the whole selinux thing), or we might at some future date make some config option for "boot up in hard-*ss mode that may break things", but for now we clearly cannot enable it by default. I've added people from the original commit and the previous discussion to the cc, and marked the commit for stable too. Thanks, Linus -- 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/