From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262041AbVAYSId (ORCPT ); Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:08:33 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262042AbVAYSId (ORCPT ); Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:08:33 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:4551 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262041AbVAYSIb (ORCPT ); Tue, 25 Jan 2005 13:08:31 -0500 Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 10:08:10 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Bill Davidsen cc: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu, John Richard Moser , Arjan van de Ven , Ingo Molnar , Christoph Hellwig , Dave Jones , Andrew Morton , marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com, Greg KH , chrisw@osdl.org, Alan Cox , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: thoughts on kernel security issues In-Reply-To: <41F6816D.1020306@tmr.com> Message-ID: References: <1106157152.6310.171.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> <200501191947.j0JJlf3j024206@turing-police.cc.vt.edu> <41F6604B.4090905@tmr.com> <41F6816D.1020306@tmr.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Bill Davidsen wrote: > > No,perhaps it isn't clear. If A changes the way a lock is used (for > example), then all the places which were using the lock the old way have > to use it the new way, or lockups or similar bad behaviour occur. Sure. Some patches are like that, but even then you can split it out so that one patch does _only_ that part, and is verifiable as doing only that part. It's also pretty rare. We've had a few big ones like that, notably when moving a BKL around (moving it from the VFS layer down into each individual filesystem). And I can't see that really happening in a security-only patch. Linus