Zack's Kernel News
Zack's Kernel News

In kernel news: The "Filesystem" System; Maintaining GitHub Kernel Forks; and Going In or Going Out?
The "Filesystem" System
Dov Murik from IBM posted some confidential computing (coco) patches. This is gussied-up marketing speak for "sandbox" (i.e., an isolated set of processes that implement security protections for whatever is going on inside). But, I'm not here to talk about coco.
The interesting thing was that Dov's patches used SecurityFS to provide the interface between the user and the secure area, which turned out to be controversial. SecurityFS came along about 15 years ago in the 2.6 timeframe in response to a frightening proliferation of homespun filesystems. The idea was for security modules to use the same SecurityFS application programming interface (API) and just do whatever insanity was boiling their brains in the back end. SecurityFS simply provided a consistent gateway so everyone's various concepts could be straightforwardly navigated by everyone else.
Greg Kroah-Hartman replied to Dov:
[...]
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