From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751403AbVHVWz1 (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:55:27 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1751406AbVHVWz1 (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:55:27 -0400 Received: from zeus1.kernel.org ([204.152.191.4]:63885 "EHLO zeus1.kernel.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751403AbVHVWz0 (ORCPT ); Mon, 22 Aug 2005 18:55:26 -0400 To: Greg KH Cc: Daniel Phillips , Joel Becker , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] Permissions don't stick on ConfigFS attributes References: <200508201050.51982.phillips@istop.com> <20050820030117.GA775@kroah.com> From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 22:49:20 -0600 In-Reply-To: <20050820030117.GA775@kroah.com> (Greg KH's message of "Fri, 19 Aug 2005 20:01:17 -0700") Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.1007 (Gnus v5.10.7) Emacs/21.4 (gnu/linux) 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 I am confused. I am beginning to see shades of the devfs problems coming up again. sysfs is built to be world readable by everyone who has it mounted in their namespace. Writable files in sysfs I have never understood. Given that we now have files which do not conform to one uniform policy for everyone is there any reason why we do not want to allocate a character device major number for all config values and dynamically allocate a minor number for each config value? Giving each config value its own unique entry under /dev. Device nodes for each writable config value trivially handles persistence and user policy and should be easy to implement in the kernel. We already have a policy engine in userspace, udev to handle all of the chaos. Why do we need another mechanism? Are device nodes out of fashion these days? Eric