From: Stephen Tweedie (Stephen_Tweedie@p100.f2003.n241.z2.fidonet.org)
Date: 03/25/93


From: Stephen_Tweedie@p100.f2003.n241.z2.fidonet.org (Stephen Tweedie)
Subject: 386bsd, linux: which runs mo..
Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1993 14:55:00 GMT

AREA:COMP.OS.LINUX
From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie)
Organization: University of Edinburgh Dept. of Computer Science, Scotland

> Completely unsupported rumor follows...

> I seem to recall hearing that there is a known race condition in the
> minix-fs which can cause problems and that there was no intention to fix it
> since in the long run the minix-fs was "going away" and triggering the bug
> was thought to be difficult. Can somebody speak to this RUMOR please?

The 0.99pl7 kernel introduced a feature where all filenames passed to
the kernel are copied to kernel space before they are used; this
hopefully (!) prevents any races due to the kernel trying to access
filename data which is in swapped user memory.

The double-filename bug was supposed to be due to exactly this kind of
problem, so we may well have now seen the last of it.

Cheers,
 Stephen Tweedie.