task_struct is an internal structure to the kernel with a lot of good
information, that is probably interesting in core dumps. However there is
no way for user space to know what format that information is in making it
useless.
I grepped the GDB 6.3 source code and NT_TASKSTRUCT while defined is not
used anywhere else. So I would be surprised if anyone notices it is
missing.
In addition exporting kernel pointers to all the interesting kernel data
structures sounds like the very definition of an information leak. I
haven't a clue what someone with evil intentions could do with that
information, but in any attack against the kernel it looks like this is the
perfect tool for aiming that attack.
So since NT_TASKSTRUCT is useless as currently defined and is potentially
dangerous, let's just not export it.
(akpm: Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org> "would be amazed" if anything was
using NT_TASKSTRUCT).
Signed-off-by: Eric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
a928972864