On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Rusty Russell wrote:
> Sure. It was due to minimalism. If you override a symbol it's
> undefined behavior. It should be fairly simple to add a check that
> noone overrides a symbol. We didn't bother checking for it because it
> wasn't clear that it was problematic.
Thanx.
Of all the problems (including kernel crashes, BUGs etc) one of the
more serious kinds are the ones where someone writes a new module and
accidently defines a function which has the same name as one of functions
(say foo_export), already EXPORTed by either kernel proper or some
loaded module (as the kernel is growing bigger chances of this happening
is also growing). The module happily loads and then some other module
which wants to use the function foo_export (obviously the one EXPORTed by
kernel proper and not the one overidden by the overiding module) is
loaded. It will also load happily but will get linked against the new
foo_export, defnitely not something that he wants. And, all this has
happened without the kernel telling the user anything.
IMHO, these kind of silent errors are very dangerous and not
something that should be acceptable.
As you rightly said, it should be fairly straightforward to check for
symbol redefinition. We need to do it only for the symbols EXPORTed by the
loadable module.
Thanx,
Tomar
-- "Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work.
Practice is when something works, but you don't know why.
Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works
and they don't know why ..."
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
