On Tue, 2023-11-07 at 17:26 -0500, Paul Moore wrote:

On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 6:03 AM Roberto Sassu
[off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

On Mon, 2023-11-06 at 17:53 -0500, Paul Moore wrote:

quoted

Hi Roberto,

I know you were looking at this over the summer[1], did you ever find
a resolution to this?  If not, what do you think of just dropping
security xattr support on reiserfs?  Normally that wouldn't be
something we could consider, but given the likelihood that this hadn't
been working in *years* (if ever), and reiserfs is deprecated, I think
this is a viable option if there isn't an obvious fix.

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-security-module/CAHC9VhTM0a7jnhxpCyonepcfWbnG-OJbbLpjQi68gL2GVnKSRg@mail.gmail.com/ (local)

Hi Paul

at the time, I did some investigation and came with a patch that
(likely) solves some of the problems:

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/4aa799a0b87d4e2ecf3fa74079402074dc42b3c5.camel@huaweicloud.com/#t (local)

Ah, thanks for the link, it looks like that was swallowed by my inbox.
In general if you feel it is worth adding my email to a patch, you
should probably also CC the LSM list.  If nothing else there is a
patchwork watching the LSM list that I use to make sure I don't
miss/forget about patches.

quoted

I did a more advanced patch (to be validated), trying to fix the root
cause:

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-fsdevel/ffde7908-be73-cc56-2646-72f4f94cb51b@huaweicloud.com/ (local)

However, Jeff Mahoney (that did a lot of work in this area) suggested
that maybe we should not try invasive changes, as anyway reiserfs will
be removed from the kernel in 2025.

I tend to agree with Jeff, which is one of the reasons I was
suggesting simply removing LSM xattr support from reiserfs, although
depending on what that involves it might be a big enough change that
we are better off simply leaving it broken.  I think we need to see
what that patch would look like first.

quoted

It wouldn't be a problem to move the first patch forward.

I worry that the first patch you mentioned above doesn't really solve
anything, it only makes it the responsibility of the user to choose
either A) a broken system where LSM xattrs don't work or B) a system
that will likely deadlock/panic.  I think I would rather revert the
original commit and just leave the LSM xattrs broken than ask a user
to make that choice.

Ok, that would be fine for me.

Thanks

Roberto