Re: The Hurd: what is it?

[Marco Gerards]

Marcus Brinkmann <marcus.brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:

> The active translator problem seems serious to me.  Without any
> guarantee about the implementation of a service, you can not know what
> it does.  This means that you must be prepared for any malicious
> behaviour, including: no response (stalling the client), infinite
> virtual directory tree, confusing inode numbers and link counts,
> rapidly changing filesystem structure (to trigger race conditions) etc
> etc.
>
> This is why in FUSE, users don't see the user filesystems of other
> users.  I am afraid that given the seriousness of the problem, this is
> the only sane option.  Only with a broader semantic framework can you
> re-enable sharing on a case by case basis.

This was discussed on bug-hurd before.  Doesn't the proposed solution
of making it possible for the user to configure which translators are
trusted and which are not?  For example, I could configure I only want
to follow translators set by root and myself.

--
Marco