[OpenAFS-devel] Current pthread PAM patch for Debian

[Russ Allbery]

Tracy Di Marco White <gendalia@gmail.com> writes:

> I've been looking at making OpenAFS work on NetBSD/amd64.  I have no
> problems with NetBSD/i386, with and without PAM (well, other than I have
> to use arla for actual client support), but on amd64 with PAM I'm seeing
> the need for the same type of hackery.  What would be the direction
> needed to go for making this work in the mainline source tree?

Well, there are a couple of problems with integrating this into mainline:

 * Linking with all the object files of the shared libraries except for
   some excluded with grep -v is just too ugly for words.  It's a minimal
   change for Debian, which is why I did it that way (the entirety of the
   change is localized in pam/Makefile.in), but it's not the right way to
   do it in mainline.

   The best thing to do, of course, would be to link the PAM modules
   against the actual shared libraries, but this requires finalizing (or
   at least commiting to stabilizing) the ABI of the shared libraries and
   making sure that they're handled properly on at least the major
   platforms we care about.

 * Right now, using the pthread libraries will mean that the PAM modules,
   if run with nofork (and the current forking mode is an ugly hack), will
   leak threads.  That should be fixed.  Maybe there's some way to get the
   PAM module to kill the thread off when it's done authenticating, some
   way that isn't too high on overhead?

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>