On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 10:03:48AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > a) i_writecount is about VM_DENYWRITE, basically. ?Reusing it for ima could > > get unpleasant; when it's positive, we are fine, but it can get negative as > > well. ?IMA will have interesting time dealing with that. > > > > b) i_count is simply a refcount for struct inode. ?Not exactly the number > > of dentries, but that's the main contributor. ?Basically, that's "how many > > pointers outside of inode hash chains point that that struct inode at the > > moment". > > My question was deeper. More along the lines of "why would IMA care?" > > How/why could IMA ever care about the pointless and trivial > differences between its current private open/read/write counts and the > counts that we already maintain? > > Yes, yes, I realize that they have technical differences in what they > count. That's not the question. The question is "Why would IMA care?" I'd rather not say what I think about IMA sanity (and usefulness); as for what it tries to do... They want to whine if you open a file that is already opened for write and they want to whine if you open a file for write when it's already opened for read. Unless they decide to leave the file alone, that is. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
