Shared library permissions in Debian-land and Red Hat-land

Przemek Klosowski przemek.klosowski at nist.gov
Mon Mar 28 20:05:44 UTC 2011


On 03/24/2011 02:49 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> On Thursday 24 March 2011, you wrote:
>> Hmm, I thought there'd be a catch. What's executable permission needed
>> for? Isn't that just reading/parsing? I can do some work but I am
>> totally unfamiliar with this area.
>
> Files which aren't executable aren't even considered as candidates for being
> ELF files to extract debuginfo from.
>
> Without execute permission, you'd have to check EVERY SINGLE installed FILE
> for being ELF, that might be a significant performance hit. It'd have to be
> tried at least.

OK, so executable permission is used as a tag for identifying ELF files.
It's a little inelegant because there are some negative side effects
from executing those non-executable files.

If, hypothetically, we wanted to change that, is there any other way to
reliably mark ELF files? I could think of those:

- extended  filesystem attributes? works but might be FS-dependent
- make the files owned by a special ELF group
- a system-level directory of ELF files maintained by e.g. RPM


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