Re: RFC: Starting a stable kernel series off the 2.6 kernel

Arjan van de Ven
2005-12-05T21:06:09Z

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 22:00 +0100, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Matthias Andree:
>
> > The point that just escaped you as the motivation for this thread was
> > the availability of security (or other critical) fixes for older
> > kernels. It would all be fine if, say, the fix for CVE-2004-2492 were
> > available for those who find 2.6.8 works for them (the fix went into
> > 2.6.14 BTW), and the concern is the development model isn't fit to
> > accomodate needs like this.
>
> Well, if there's a CVE name, the proper patch isn't *that* far away
> (someone has already done a bit of work to isolate the fix). The real
> issue seems to be how to make sure that CVE names are assigned during
> the kernel development process (and not just as an afterthought by the
> security folks).

security@kernel.org works that way already in a way. Of course it'd be
nice to add a cve name while coding the security hole into the kernel,
but nobody is that clearvoyant ;) The hardest part is actually knowing
which versions are affected, especially when the code no longer quite is
the same, the locking rules got cleaned up in later versions (which
means the older kernel was a mess, so you're always looking at more
messy code than the "new" kernel). For some stuff this is easy. For
other stuff it for sure isn't, especially if you want to keep api/abi
compatibility, or at least low impact. Some security fixes just are
invasive. Those are rare, maybe 2 or 3 times a year or so. But they do
exist... unfortunate as it is. The irony is that doing a "hacky" less
invasive risk actually may introduce more risk to stability than doing
the full invasive fix. Nasty trade-offs there....