[List CCd. I hate Gmail.]

Noob alert.

On 3 July 2014 02:28, Qu Wenruo <[email protected]> wrote:
> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] Revert "btrfs: allow mounting btrfs subvolumes w=
ith
> different ro/rw options"
> From: Goffredo Baroncelli <[email protected]>
> To: Qu Wenruo <[email protected]>, [email protected]
> Date: 2014=E5=B9=B407=E6=9C=8803=E6=97=A5 01:48
>>
>> On 07/01/2014 11:30 AM, Qu Wenruo wrote:
>>>
>>> This commit has the following problem:
>>> 1) Break the ro mount rule.
>>> When users mount the whole btrfs ro, it is still possible to mount
>>> subvol rw and change the contents. Which make the whole fs ro mount
>>> non-sense.
>>
>> Where is the problem ? I see an use case when I want a conservative
>> default: mount all ro except some subvolumes.
>>
>> In any case it is not a security problem because if the user has the
>> capability to mount a subvolume, also he has the capability to remount,r=
w
>> the whole filesystem.
>>
>>
>>
> Not security problem but behavior not consistent.
> If user mount the whole disk ro, he or she want the fs read only and noth=
ing
> will change in it.
> If you mount a subvol rw, then the whole disk ro expectation is broken.
> Things will change even the whole
> disk is readonly.

This assumption seems wrong and untenable if considered from a
different angle: one doesn't mount the "whole disk" ro, merely the
default subvolume.

# mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt

is merely convenient short-hand for

# mount -o ro,subvol=3D@ [or whatever] /dev/sda1 /mnt

and anyone who expects this to magically protect the whole disk is,
frankly, confused.

Substituting partitions for subvolumes: mounting /dev/sda2 read-only
should have no effect on /dev/sda3.
Even if you went a bit batty and decided to make /dev/sda2 the
"default partition":

# ln -sf /dev/sda2 /dev/sda
# mount -o ro /dev/sda /mnt/this/is/silly

syntactic sugar doesn't change anything.

Subvolumes are logically discrete entities, the fact that they share
trees on-disk is merely a (very nice) implementation detail. It is
impossible to mount a "whole disk" under btrfs.

Tobias

> The problem also happens when a parent subvol is mounted rw but child sub=
vol
> is mounted ro.
> User can still modify the child subvol through parent subvol, still broke
> the readonly rule.

This makes sense, though.
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