From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933347Ab0J0NhQ (ORCPT ); Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:37:16 -0400 Received: from tundra.namei.org ([65.99.196.166]:36044 "EHLO tundra.namei.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756723Ab0J0NhO (ORCPT ); Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:37:14 -0400 Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:35:07 +1100 (EST) From: James Morris To: Al Viro cc: Linus Torvalds , John Stoffel , Christoph Hellwig , "J.H." , Eric Paris , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-security-module@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org, zohar@us.ibm.com, david@fromorbit.com, kyle@mcmartin.ca, hpa@zytor.com, akpm@linux-foundation.org, mingo@elte.hu Subject: Re: [PATCH 01/11] IMA: use rbtree instead of radix tree for inode information cache In-Reply-To: <20101026181310.GY19804@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> Message-ID: References: <20101025184118.20504.24290.stgit@paris.rdu.redhat.com> <19653.55494.240658.165153@quad.stoffel.home> <4CC5DCBB.1070505@kernel.org> <20101025205746.GA6568@infradead.org> <19654.57160.616600.480900@quad.stoffel.home> <20101026181310.GY19804@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> User-Agent: Alpine 2.00 (LRH 1167 2008-08-23) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 26 Oct 2010, Al Viro wrote: > FWIW, I'm OK with that. My general opinion about the quality and > usefulness of security/* is a separate story, but if we are stuck > with that shit in the tree, let's at least trim down what can be > trimmed down. If you have any specific concerns about code in security/ then please do explain them (in a different thread), so we can address them. Note that if code is not being used, and/or has serious technical issues, it can be removed. This already happened once with the BSD secure levels, which was basically unused, unmaintained, and had unfixable security issues -- it was taken out and shot. Unfortunately, we have to deal with the fact that Unix was not designed with security primarily in mind, and that the security it does have is inherently flawed (all according to Ritchie c. 1970s). We have to maintain decades of backward compatibility, address underlying flaws, and also address new forms of security threats which could not have even been imagined at the time. We have to do all this without maybe using more than a few extra bytes in any major core data structure, and with nobody really agreeing on how to do it. Expecting perfection out of this process is probably unreasonable, alas. - James -- James Morris