Re: rfs xattr's, mkinitrd and other stories

On Thu, 11 Sep 2003 21:47, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-09-10 at 20:48, Russell Coker wrote:
> > none /selinux selinuxfs noauto 0
> > 0
>
> Why noauto? It needs to be mounted if you are running SELinux, and it
> will just fail with a warning if the kernel doesn't have SELinux
> enabled.

When booting without an initrd I have to mount it before init is run. This means that I have two options, "mount -n" or mounting the root fs rw to allow writing to /etc/mtab and then umounting it again (for a possible fsck). However if the file system is inconsistent then this would be a bad idea, so "mount -n" seems the only option for a non-initrd system.

Using "mount -n" means that "mount -a" will try to mount it again if it is set for auto-mount, so "noauto" solves this (as long as there is an explicit mount command).

> > A special file system for SE Linux related entries. I can't understand
> > why it wasn't just made part of /proc, Steve, perhaps you could explain.
>
> Misuse of /proc isn't viewed favorably by the kernel developers. The
> preferred approach is to create your own pseudo filesystem type.
> selinuxfs was based on the nfsd pseudo filesystem in 2.5/6.

So instead of having a dozen different sub-directories of /proc we'll have a dozen different file systems to be individually mounted, umounted, and tracked. This does not seem to be a benefit to me. Of course my opinion counts for nothing in this debate even though I'm the one that'll do much of the user-space work of supporting this. :(

-- 
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