Re: bogous binfmt_misc patch in 2.2.0-pre1

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Fri, 1 Jan 1999 12:53:31 -0800 (PST)


On Fri, 1 Jan 1999, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> Ok. But I hope you wouldn't mind inserting into binfmt_misc something that
> does:
>
> #ifndef CONFIG_PROC_FS
> #error You really need /proc support for binfmt_misc. Please reconfigure!
> #endif

Sure, that makes the error much more obvious. Consider it done.

> About why not having /proc: According to Alan's buglist, there are some
> issues meaning that you don't want /proc if you can consider your users
> hostile (for example students on a university computer). Dummy-functions for
> config_proc_fs will cure this ofcourse.

It's not about not having /proc - although in a hostile environment I'd
still suggest using a standard configuration and just not _mount_ it, or
preferably mount it in a protected place so that root can still get the
"ps" output, for example.

It's about modularity: if somebody doesn't want to have /proc filesysystem
support, we should NOT have to know about that decision in other places
all over the map. We should NOT have to have

#ifdef CONFIG_PROC_FS

inside drivers/scsi/fdomain.c - do you see my point?

So what I suggested as the real fix is to leave the internal /proc
interfaces there even if /proc doesn't actually exist: that way, when
somebody disables /proc in the config, everything else will still happily
compile as if it was there, it just won't do anything.

Yes, it might cause a few unnecessary functions to be compiled that aren't
actually ever used and thus wasting a few hundred bytes of memory, but I'd
_much_ prefer a clean kernel that doesn't have to worry about spurious
config options all over the place.

Linus

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