Re: thoughts on kernel security issues

[Alan Cox]

On Mer, 2005-01-26 at 19:15, Olaf Hering wrote:
> And, did that nice interface help at all? No, it did not.
> Noone made seqfile mandatory in 2.6.
> Now we have a few nice big patches to carry around because every driver
> author had its own proc implementation. Well done...

seqfile has helped immensely from what I can see. And gradually it takes
over the kernel because each time someone has a broken proc driver it is
easier to rewrite it in seq_file than fix it any other way.

All good API's work that way, and they really do work. You only have to
look at things like the statistics for Gnome application string caused
security errors versus those for generic C apps to see the huge effect
stuff like g_string classes have had on reliability.

We need *more* API's like this - we are lacking some nice helpers for
simple block/char devices and also lacking a "call under lock" construct
which avoids forgetting to drop locks for example.

Alan

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