Comment 16 for bug 1813662

@Pino: Thanks for emphasizing that only Ubuntu (and derivatives) is affected. I should have researched myself, sorry.

Thank you for feedback on my ideas on solving the problem, I can see that change in libguestfs funcitonality is more complex than I thought. At least my ideas have now been reviewed by the right people.

I completely agree with you that idea 2; a suid binary is not a good
idea. I will read up the technical documentation to understand the
problems with idea 1, thanks.

@maintainers (hereamong Richard Jones):

I understand that you have requested a change (revert) in the linux package on ubuntu so read permission is not restricted to root user (https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/759725) as this has broken the libguestfs functionality on ubuntu.
I also understand that there is no real security reasons for restricting read-access to the system kernels.

However it seems that the kernel maintainers are still decided to not
open up for read-permission on kernel images (rationally or not). To
help users (those who compile and install them self) know what they
need to do in order to make it work on ubuntu I wonder if it was worth
adding these steps (change file permission on kernel images) in the
documentation. It could be added on
http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-building.1.html. Either in section
"BUILDING FROM TARBALLS" or "INSTALLING" and eventually mention that
this is due to the bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/759725 that you
have reported. Maybe even better to actually perform this file
permission change during "make install" on Ubuntu only of course.

Just another idea in the hope of improving the end-user experience.