adding CAP_RESERVED_# bits

Luigi Semenzato semenzato at google.com
Fri Jun 6 17:57:45 UTC 2025


Recently I inquired about the decision process for adding a CAP_DRM
bit to capability.h (to become DRM master).  It occurred to me that
the process for adding ANY bit would be fraught with controversies (to
say the least).

So I looked into maintaining a patch in our own kernel sources, but
that was surprisingly messy due to the build-time dependencies of
capability.h and the way we maintain and share sources internally for
multiple kernel versions.  This would have been quite simple if there
were a few reserved bits, such as CAP_RESERVED_0, ..,
CAP_RESERVED_<N-1> with, say, N=3.

Would this also be controversial?

Thanks!



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