Common kernel file loader

This page documents progress the goal of a generic kernel file loader 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 to load a file into a local buffer. 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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Current file loader locations

These are the currently known file loader solutions in place on the kernel. There can be more, if you aware of others please list them here. Perhaps a coccinelle script can be used to hunt for them.

• 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>