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Date:      Sun, 4 Aug 2013 08:17:54 -0700
From:      "Simon J. Gerraty" <sjg@juniper.net>
To:        Jilles Tjoelker <jilles@stack.nl>
Cc:        svn-src-head@FreeBSD.org, svn-src-all@FreeBSD.org, Hiroki Sato <hrs@FreeBSD.org>, src-committers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r253887 - head/sys/dev/filemon
Message-ID:  <20130804151754.8189758097@chaos.jnpr.net>
In-Reply-To: <20130804100304.GB35080@stack.nl>
References:  <201308021444.r72EiBk2059771@svn.freebsd.org> <20130802152204.GA1880@stack.nl> <20130804.121523.488481502477873993.hrs@allbsd.org> <20130804100304.GB35080@stack.nl>

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>>  Thank you for your comments.  Can you review the attached patch?  If
>>  there is no problem, I will commit this and MFC to stable branches.

Looks good.
But don't commit it untested ;-)
I can test it for you.

>Perhaps it is best to commit this patch, but also add a warning to
>filemon(4) that it should not be loaded on systems with untrusted users
>or the permissions on /dev/filemon should be restricted (via
>/etc/devfs.rules).

That would largely defeat the purpose.
This driver was written to overcome issues with dtrace:

a/ it needed privs beyond normal user
b/ it could not reliably provide path of binary being exec'd
c/ performace

#b is probably fixable, but the fix could not be relied on to exist 
everywhere.

This driver looks at a very limited set of syscalls, and does not report
anything beyond pathnames read/written/exec'd.
In the NetBSD version I even dropped stat calls as being unnecessary
(for make).

dtrace would meet many of Robert's criteria for a general purpose
functionality but allows far more functionality, and apart from the
issues above, cannot (I'm told) be ported to linux.
A simple driver like this can be.





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