Re: High UID support for Linux
H. Peter Anvin (hpa@transmeta.com)
26 Nov 1998 20:33:10 GMT
Followup to: <E0zioU5-0000tA-00@taurus.cus.cam.ac.uk>
By author: pjb1008@cam.ac.uk (Peter Benie)
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> They can't switch do glibc if they don't have the source, or if the
> source can't be compiled any more (eg. they wrote it in C++ and the
> language changed under their feet).
>
> I think its reasonable to require that essential system programs on a
> system that uses uids >= 65536 are linked with glibc2, but it is
> desirable that programs that users have imported from other Linux
> systems continue to work.
>
> A slightly horrible solution to this is to have the libc fake the
> result of getpwuid by remapping all uids >= 65536 to a uid reserved
> for this purpose. getpwuid can then map the result back to the user's
> real uid, which will allow getpwuid(getuid()) to give the right answer
> _for the current user_. Clearly, this approach is a disaster for file
> archiving programs etc, so it might want to not have that behaviour by
> default, but it will work for many applications that are only
> interested in the user that called the application.
>
I don't think this is beneficial. Any uid/gid-aware program is going
to have to deal. There just isn't a way around it. Fortunately not
too many programs really care about uid/gid's.
-hpa
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