On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 10:39 +0100, Declan Moriarty wrote: > You are very kind to them. Between the old way and the new, even m$ > would have gone bust if they had tried that. The trouble is, the new > way > is going to be worse. They tried this with pcmcia support and > succeeded > in proving that linux was a _lousy_ platform for responding to device > changes on the fly. Ditto with apm, which the laptop guys poured their > brains into for years, only to find it buggered beyond belief by the > variations and they dumped 6 years of hard work and started with acpi, > which, AFAICT, is going the same way.
Be fair - blaming the linux developers for APM and ACPI is just wrong. Those are the hardware standards they need to support if people are to usefully run Linux on laptops - you think even trying to support those standards is a bad idea? > Automount - remember that? Devfs - rewmember that? The current > failure is udev. It runs so totally counter to the secure nature of > linux (No hacker can even climb up the suers into a linux box) to have > a > hacker be able to plug a usb disk into the usb port and have > everything > say "Hello!", welcome it, and mount it! Ok, that's just paranoid, and somewhat uninformed. Udev does one thing - it creates device nodes in /dev when the kernel tells it to. No more, no less. What you appear to be thinking of is more extended frameworks like HAL, but all that does is monitor available hardware and notify userspace clients of any relevant changes. However, it doesn't automount anything either - all it does is maintain policy on what to do with devices, and pass it on to any interested listeners. In fact, the only thing that actually does automounting is a user service - gnome-volume-manager in Gnome, or some KDE equivalent. But both of these are run as ordinary users, and subject to whatever permissions that user has. In Ubuntu (and recent Debian), hotplugged devices are always assigned (by udev, I think) to a particular group, so only members of that group can mount them. Short version, do you really think these guys haven't considered security at all? I follow the HAL mailing list, and they take it pretty seriously - many of the core developers are Redhat employees who work fairly closely with the people working on SE-Linux, trying to lock things down even more than Linux has traditionally allowed.
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