* James Morris (jmorrisat_private) wrote: > > Nope, David was correct. The spinlocking only imposes memory ordering > with respect to its lock and critical region, which doesn't help us if > pointer assignments are not atomic. Yes, I misinterpreted the use of the spinlock. It is exactly as you describe. But as it seems, the pointer assignment is not an issue. > The locking is still needed for > unprotected use of the registration interface, though. So we go back to, how paranoid are we? Randomly calling register_security outside of module_init is certainly legal, although I guess could be considered abuse of the interface. OTOH, implicit reliance on the BKL is not exactly nice. I support adding the extra locking. > However, I have been told by one of the kernel port maintainers that > pointer assignments will always be atomic where the pointers are aligned > correctly, for all current archs. This means we should be ok, as the > pointers we are using will be aligned correctly by the compiler. Ok, this is the same thing I dug up. Register size assignments are guaranteed atomic. thanks, -chris -- Linux Security Modules http://lsm.immunix.org http://lsm.bkbits.net _______________________________________________ linux-security-module mailing list linux-security-moduleat_private http://mail.wirex.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-security-module
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