Re: thoughts on kernel security issues

[Olaf Hering]

 On Wed, Jan 26, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> The biggest part of that is having nice interfaces. If you have good 
> interfaces, bugs are less likely to be problematic. For example, the 
> "seq_file" interfaces for /proc were written to clean up a lot of common 
> mistakes, so that the actual low-level code would be much simpler and not 
> have to worry about things like buffer sizes and page boundaries. I don't 
> know/remember if it actually fixed any security issues, but I'm confident 
> it made them less likely, just by making it _easier_ to write code that 
> doesn't have silly bounds problems.

And, did that nice interface help at all? No, it did not.
Noone made seqfile mandatory in 2.6.
Now we have a few nice big patches to carry around because every driver
author had its own proc implementation. Well done...

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