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

From: GOTO Masanori
Date: Thu Jan 15 2004 - 19:47:11 EST


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?

Regards,
-- gotom

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