Re: KPTI for 4.1 LTS

[Greg KH <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 08:11:58AM +0000, Francesco Del Degan wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Jan 2018 10:40:17 +0100, Greg KH wrote:
> 
> > Ick, why would you be using a kernel that is about to be end-of-life
> > anyway?  Why can't you use 4.9 or even better, 4.14?
> 
> Since we mantain a custom distro, upgrading to a different major kernel 
> version is not an option atm (QA, etc).

Really?  What are you going to do when this goes end-of-life in 3
months?  Seems like you should already be planning for that, right?

Also, you should always be able to run a new kernel on an old distro
with no problems, we made that guarantee over a decade ago and have not
broken it that I know of.  If something breaks, let us know.

> I was asking just because we saw that some distro based on 4.1 as well 
> (Oracle linux, etc) have patched it on its own, so we wondered if 
> something more upstream would have been available before starting our 
> backporting efforts too.
> 
> Due to particular nature of vulnerability I was expected that at least 
> this would be patched in all *current* LTS (the 3.2 that shares the same 
> EOL date was patched like 10 days ago).

If you will note, different people maintain the different trees, and
they all have different amounts of time they can devote to this:
	https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html
If you were to provide working patches for 4.1, I'm sure that would make
things go quicker :)

thanks,

greg k-h