From: James Morris The patch below removes the CLONE_FILES flag from the kernel_thread() call which starts init. This is to prevent other kernel threads from sharing file descriptors opened by init (try 'lsof /dev/initctl' on a 2.6 system :-). The reason this patch is being proposed is so that usermode helper apps launched via kernel threads (e.g. modprobe, hotplug) do not then inherit any such file descriptors. This is not a problem in itself so far (other than being messy), but it is a problem for SELinux, which will otherwise need to grant access to /dev/initctl by modprobe and hotplug, a somewhat undesirable scenario. As far as I can tell, there is no reason why init needs to be spawned with CLONE_FILES. Please let me know if there are any objections to the change, which I would like to propose for 2.6.0+ as a cleanup. 25-akpm/init/main.c | 2 +- 1 files changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff -puN init/main.c~init-remove-CLONE_FILES init/main.c --- 25/init/main.c~init-remove-CLONE_FILES Mon Nov 17 12:50:43 2003 +++ 25-akpm/init/main.c Mon Nov 17 12:50:43 2003 @@ -375,7 +375,7 @@ static void __init smp_init(void) static void rest_init(void) { - kernel_thread(init, NULL, CLONE_KERNEL); + kernel_thread(init, NULL, CLONE_FS | CLONE_SIGHAND); unlock_kernel(); cpu_idle(); } _