sambaXP 2022: Symlink races for dummies and how to deal with them
Jeremy Allison wants to remove symlinks from Unix (see https://lwn.net/Articles/882177/ ). Until they are gone, we will live in the legacy world with symlinks for quite a while. Jeremy Allison and Ralph Böhme have rewritten Samba to make it safe from symlink races. Ralph Böhme has presented most of this work last year at SambaXP under the covers of a general modernization of Samba's VFS ( • sambaXP 2021: The New VFS ).
This sambaXP 2022 talk by Volker Lendecke (SerNet / Samba Team) will be a sequel to Ralph's talk: Work is ongoing to build upon the rewrite of the VFS to utilize directory file descriptors in a lot more places than it is done right now. This work is driven by the hope to express symlink-safety more explicitly in the Samba code using safe directory handles. If this turns out to be successful, Samba will become more resilient against symlink races, future developments will have it easier to remain safe. Also, it will speed up Samba's path-based operations.
Slides: https://sambaxp.org/fileadmin/user_up...
Visit the conference website at: https://sambaxp.org