Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 05 Feb 2019 15:07:42 -0800 | Subject | Re: [PATCH v5 01/13] taint: Introduce a new taint flag (insecure) | From | hpa@zytor ... |
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On February 5, 2019 2:46:11 PM PST, Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org> wrote: >On 2/5/19 1:21 PM, Andrew Morton wrote: >> On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 18:42:29 -0800 Andy Lutomirski <luto@kernel.org> >wrote: >> >>> On Fri, Feb 1, 2019 at 12:54 PM Chang S. Bae ><chang.seok.bae@intel.com> wrote: >>>> >>>> For testing (or root-only) purposes, the new flag will serve to tag >the >>>> kernel taint accurately. >>>> >>>> When adding a new feature support, patches need to be incrementally >>>> applied and tested with temporal parameters. Currently, there is no >flag >>>> for this usage. >>> >>> I think this should be reviewed by someone like akpm. akpm, for >>> background, this is part of an x86 patch series. If only part of >the >>> series is applied, the kernel will be blatantly insecure (but still >>> functional and useful for testing and bisection), and this taint >flag >>> will be set if this kernel is booted. With the whole series >applied, >>> there are no users of the taint flag in the kernel. >>> >>> Do you think this is a good idea? >> >> What does "temporal parameters" mean? A complete description of this >> testing process would help. >> >> I sounds a bit strange. You mean it assumes that people will >partially >> apply the series to test its functionality? That would be >inconvenient. > >Ack. I don't think we need to (or should) worry about that kind of >muckup. > >> - Can the new and now-unused taint flag be removed again at >> end-of-series? >> >> - It would be a lot more convenient if we had some means of testing >> after the whole series is applied, on a permanent basis - some >> debugfs flag, perhaps? >>
I would like to see this taint flag, though, because sometimes it is useful to write test modules (e.g. when I was testing SMAP) which are dangerous even if out of tree.
In case of an escape or pilot error gets it into the wrong kernel, it is a very good thing to have the kernel flagged. -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
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