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Hi everyone, |
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|
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So by now most people have heard the news that the Grsecurity/PaX team |
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are no longer going to be making their stable patches available. The |
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reason is that they are in dispute with a certain embedded systems |
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vendor and those negotiations broke down. So they decided to make their |
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stable patches only available to the sponsors. [1] |
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|
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What does this mean for Gentoo? Up until now I have been maintaining |
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both the grsec upstream stable and testing patchsets in our |
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hardened-sources. Currently the upstream stable kernels are 3.2.71 and |
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3.14.51 and the testing are 4.1.6. In about one week, the 3.2.71 and |
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3.14.51 patchsets will no longer be available and I'll continue pushing |
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out the 4.1.6. Unfortunately the testing patchset is precisely as the |
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name suggests --- for testing and not production. For the embedded |
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systems company this will be the kiss of death because those patches are |
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not suitable for long term. For Gentoo it will mean that I will have to |
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be more vigilant about bugs and trying to stick with a well known kernel |
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before moving on. You can still use these kernels in production, but |
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you must be carefull about instabilities as upstream pushes out |
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experimental feature that may oops or panic. Keep older kernel images |
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around and revert if it doesn't work. Look to this list for |
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announcements about more serious issues like things that can cause data |
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loss. |
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|
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I'm hoping that once this company feels the sting of what has just |
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happened, they'll come back to the table and talk with Grsec/PaX people. |
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They won't be able to ship boards with grsec anymore because its not so |
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easy to switch out a kernel on a board! If they ship a board with a |
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bug, they loose. We just reboot :) |
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[1] https://grsecurity.net/ |
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|
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-- |
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Anthony G. Basile, Ph. D. |
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Chair of Information Technology |
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D'Youville College |
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Buffalo, NY 14201 |
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(716) 829-8197 |