Insecure Memory Warning! ???.

[Werner Koch]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Frank Tobin wrote:

> Seriously, given the amount of times this is posted to this mailing list,
> this warning needs to disappear, or point the user to some relevant

It would be easy to do this, but some other folks would then assume
that the locking problem has been solved by other means and therefor
they don't get the warning anymore.  Maybe another Linux version
decides that a session is allowed to lock a few K with user
priviliges.  There used to be a patch for Linux somewhere which did
something like this.

OTOH all the folks who asked about this have never read our man page:

   BUGS  
  ^^^^^^

You want to know about bugs, right?

       On many systems this program should be installed as
       setuid(root). This is necessary to lock memory pages. Locking
       memory pages prevents the operating system from writing
       memory pages to disk. If you get no warning message about
                                        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
       
       insecure memory your operating system supports locking
       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
       without being root. The program drops root privileges as
       soon as locked memory is allocated.
       
and greping for "secure" or "memory" takes you to

       --no-secmem-warning
        	Suppress  the warning about "using insecure memory".
		
If a distribution decides that this warning should not be there,
they are free to add this option to /usr/share/gnupg/options.skel.


  Werner


-- 
Werner Koch				GnuPG key:  621CC013
OpenIT GmbH                             http://www.OpenIT.de

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