Re: [REVIEW][PATCH 0/6] Wrapping up the vfs support for unprivileged mounts

From: Dave Chinner
Date: Wed May 30 2018 - 00:35:05 EST


On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 09:34:35PM -0500, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Dave Chinner <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > Yeah, the are some fairly big process and policy things that
> > need to be decided here. Not just at the kernel level, but at
> > distro and app infrastructure level too.
> >
> > I was originally sceptical of supporting kernel filesystems via
> > lkl, but the desire for unprivileged mounts has not gone away
> > and so I'm less worried about accessing filesystems that way
> > than I am of letting the kernel parse untrusted images from
> > untrusted users...
>
> There is also the more readily available libguestfs which doesn't
> support as many filesystems but does seem available in most linux
> distributions already. It already has a fuse option available
> with guestmount. I may have to dig in there and see how to make
> it available without using fusermount.

That only provides host access to filesystems mounted inside guest
VMs, right? AFAIA, libguestfs is not providing a FUSE
implementation that mounts and parses raw XFS images. e.g it barely
understands anything XFS, and that which it does is via running and
screen-scraping the output of XFS's userspace management tools...

> > I'm not sure what the correct forum for this is - wasn't this
> > something the Plumbers conference was supposed to facilitate?
>
> Yes. If we all need to be in a room and talk about things.
> It is early enough in the planning for Plumers that we could
> definitely schedule a talk or a BOF for this.

Ok. I have no idea if I'll be at plumbers - it's an awful long way
from where I am....

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx