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Message-ID: <20230813043022.GA3545@sol.localdomain> Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2023 21:30:22 -0700 From: Eric Biggers <ebiggers@...nel.org> To: Matthew Wilcox <willy@...radead.org> Cc: Theodore Ts'o <tytso@....edu>, Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@...e.de>, viro@...iv.linux.org.uk, brauner@...nel.org, jaegeuk@...nel.org, linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org, linux-f2fs-devel@...ts.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 01/10] fs: Expose helper to check if a directory needs casefolding On Sun, Aug 13, 2023 at 04:08:58AM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > On Sat, Aug 12, 2023 at 07:06:47PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote: > > One could say that this is an insane threat model, but the syzbot team > > thinks that this can be used to break out of a kernel lockdown after a > > UEFI secure boot. Which is fine, except I don't think I've been able > > to get any company (including Google) to pay for headcount to fix > > problems like this, and the unremitting stream of these sorts of > > syzbot reports have already caused one major file system developer to > > burn out and step down. > > > > So problems like this get fixed on my own time, and when I have some > > free time. And if we "simplify" the code, it will inevitably cause > > more syzbot reports, which I will then have to ignore, and the syzbot > > team will write more "kernel security disaster" slide deck > > presentations to senior VP's, although I'll note this has never > > resulted in my getting any additional SWE's to help me fix the > > problem... > > > > > So just __ext4_iget() needs to be fixed. I think we should consider doing that > > > before further entrenching all the extra ->s_encoding checks. > > > > If we can get an upstream kernel consensus that syzbot reports caused > > by writing to a mounted file system aren't important, and we can > > publish this somewhere where hopefully the syzbot team will pay > > attention to it, sure... > > What the syzbot team don't seem to understand is that more bug reports > aren't better. I used to investigate one most days, but the onslaught is > relentless and I just ignore syzbot reports now. I appreciate maintainers > don't necessarily get that privilege. > > They seem motivated to find new and exciting ways to break the kernel > without realising that they're sapping the will to work on the bugs that > we already have. > Well, one thing that the kernel community can do to make things better is identify when a large number of bug reports are caused by a single issue ("userspace can write to mounted block devices"), and do something about that underlying issue (https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230704122727.17096-1-jack@suse.cz) instead of trying to "fix" large numbers of individual "bugs". We can have 1000 bugs or 1 bug, it is actually our choice in this case. - Eric
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