• Andreas Gruenbacher's avatar
    [PATCH] Generic infrastructure for acls · f0c8bd16
    Andreas Gruenbacher authored
    The patches solve the following problem: We want to grant access to devices
    based on who is logged in from where, etc.  This includes switching back and
    forth between multiple user sessions, etc.
    
    Using ACLs to define device access for logged-in users gives us all the
    flexibility we need in order to fully solve the problem.
    
    Device special files nowadays usually live on tmpfs, hence tmpfs ACLs.
    
    Different distros have come up with solutions that solve the problem to
    different degrees: SUSE uses a resource manager which tracks login sessions
    and sets ACLs on device inodes as appropriate.  RedHat uses pam_console, which
    changes the primary file ownership to the logged-in user.  Others use a set of
    groups that users must be in in order to be granted the appropriate accesses.
    
    The freedesktop.org project plans to implement a combination of a
    console-tracker and a HAL-device-list based solution to grant access to
    devices to users, and more distros will likely follow this approach.
    
    These patches have first been posted here on 2 February 2005, and again
    on 8 January 2006. We have been shipping them in SLES9 and SLES10 with
    no problems reported.  The previous submission is archived here:
    
       http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/229
       http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/230
       http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/231
    
    This patch:
    
    Add some infrastructure for access control lists on in-memory
    filesystems such as tmpfs.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndreas Gruenbacher <agruen@suse.de>
    Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    f0c8bd16
generic_acl.c 4.19 KB