linux-kernel - Re: recent nfs change causes autofs regression

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Message-ID: <20070831074028.GR21979@unthought.net>
Date:	Fri, 31 Aug 2007 09:40:28 +0200
From:	Jakob Oestergaard <jakob@...hought.net>
To:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Cc:	Trond Myklebust <trond.myklebust@....uio.no>,
	Frank van Maarseveen <frankvm@...nkvm.com>,
	Hua Zhong <hzhong@...il.com>,
	'Linux Kernel Mailing List' <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org
Subject: Re: recent nfs change causes autofs regression

On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 10:16:37PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
...
> > Why aren't we doing that for any other filesystem than NFS?
> 
> How hard is it to acknowledge the following little word:
> 
> 	"regression"
> 
> It's simple. You broke things. You may want to fix them, but you need to 
> fix them in a way that does not break user space.

Trond has a point Linus.

What he "broke" is, for example, a ro mount being mounted as rw.

That *could* be a very serious security (etc.etc.) problem which he just fixed.
Anything depending on read-only not being enforced will cease to work, of
course, and that is what a few people complain about(!).

If ext3 in some rare case (which would still mean it hit a few thousand users)
failed to remember that a file had been marked read-only and allowed writes to
it, wouldn't we want to fix that too?  It would cause regressions, but we'd fix
it, right?

mount passes back the error code on a failed mount. autofs passes that error
along too (when people configure syslog correctly). In short; when these
serious mistakes are made and caught, the admin sees an error in his logs.

This is not wrong. This is good.

-- 

 / jakob

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