Bug#466138: Is this LVM message actually useful?

[Alasdair G Kergon]

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 01:32:08PM +0200, Andras Korn wrote:
> as far as I can tell, the "File descriptor x left open" message is just
> telling the user about open file descriptors the lvm utility inherited and
> successfully closed. 

It's often an indication of a careless programming and can lead to
security problems if a child process inherits access to a rogue file
descriptor and can interfere with it.  The messages were added during a
bug investigation to prove that LVM was not involved.

selinux with a strict policy now also detects this sort of bug.

They can be suppressed by setting the (deliberately-undocumented)
environment variable LVM_SUPPRESS_FD_WARNINGS, but really, the source of
the problem you're seeing should be addressed instead of ignoring the
symptoms.

Alasdair