Common kernel read routine

This page documents progress the goal of a generic kernel file read routine on the kernel. For a while it was looked down upon to directly read files from Linux. These days there exists a few mechanisms in the kernel that do just this though. There are minor but important checks differences on each, we should take all the best practices from each of them, generalize them and make all places in the kernel that read a file use it.

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Different file kernel read locations

• firmware_class: fw_read_file()
• module: kernel_read()
• kexec: copy_file_fd()
• IMA: integrity_read_file()
• sound: do_mod_firmware_load()

Interested developers

We plan on developing this after the holidays

• Mimi Zohar <zohar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>

• "Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@suse.com>

Volunteered developers to review

We'll volunteer these folks to review, as well as obviously fsdevel folks.

• David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>

• David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>

• Kees Cook <keescook@chromium.org>