SELinux kills multiboot

[Crux]

This just ran across my news ticker, so I thought I'd share. Not being a fan of multi-booting myself, it's no biggie for me. However, hopefully others can find the information useful. I mean, to boot into another OS you have to reboot the machine anyway. So, IMHO, why not just shut it down, use a drive tray and swap drives? Just a thought, and that's how I 'multi-boot'. Never had a GRUB or LiLO problem either. :D

Article (http://lwn.net/Articles/165530/)
Hi,

Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux), a large project that is working
thick and fast with Fedora Core, is creating compatibility problems
for "hobbiest" sysadmins, or anyone who multiboots and cross-mounts
multiple filesystems on the same box.

The latest manifestation can be seen in this thread on fedora-test-list:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2005-Dece...
FC5test1 with SELinux is hazardous to any older ext3 root filesystem:
they become unbootable.

These compatibility problems seem to be even worse than the ones
that resulted from the xattr-on-symlink bugfix to ext3 more than
a year ago, when Fedora Core 2 zapped RedHat 9 and earlier ext3:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=152827

This is worthy of a short news item, if nothing else to spread
the word that you can zap yourself.

[Mat]

since this only affects FC5 test1, it is
a) no reason to scare new users of the final release versions
and
b) wow!! a bug in a beta version ;)



Mat
ps: Moved to FC5 - Dev

[SlowJet]

Mat,

It is not a bug it is true.
The SELinux attibutes have changed twice and may change again in the future.

One Computer, One OS, one File System.

SJ

[w5set]

slowjet----One Computer, One OS, one File System.
kinda sounds like M$ thinking.......?
Hopefully FC is not heading in that direction.
Even though I don't dual boot or even have 2 hard drives (different OS/distro's) in the computers at the same time, I would hate to lose this capability. FC/Linux needs to be able to play well with other children...

[SlowJet]

Well I am amazed that someone finally admitted to the fact that Linux is a toy for children.:)
So if I code some sloppy windows f/s driver that automounts your ext3, xfs and LVM's and then displays them all over the desktop
and lets any windows program read and write to them, you have no problem with that?

How about your MAC, or secure BSD or Solarius f/s, can I automount those in windows and write on them with my "pretty sure it works" driver?

SJ

[cybrjackle]

I boot a rawhide and rhel4 laptop and as long as you trun selinux off, I can read the ext3 fs on the external drive.