Re: [PATCH 4.4] vsyscall: Fix permissions for emulate mode with KAISER/PTI

Hugh Dickins
2018-01-28T20:27:37Z

On Sun, Jan 28, 2018 at 4:13 AM, Greg Kroah-Hartman
<gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 12:23:17PM -0800, Hugh Dickins wrote:
>> I haven't updated those 3.18 patches since that time, and was a day or
>> two away from asking you, Greg, what is the status of 3.18? I didn't
>> bother to update those patches because I saw it marked EOL as soon as
>> Meltdown+Spectre was announced; yet it now appears to have a life
>> beyond death, getting non-Meltdown+Spectre updates every week or so.
>
> I am not doing any Meltdown/Spectre patches for 3.18, because yes, it
> really is EOL. I am only continuing to maintain it because there are
> some vendors that rely on it at the moment, and they usually just take
> these releases + the android-common kernel tree together. As the needed
> ARM Meltdown patches are in the android-common tree right now (and not
> really anywhere else at all), that is sufficient for their use.
>
>> I can certainly (but not until next week) put together a 3.18.92-
>> based tarfile or tarfiles, equivalent to what I sent for 3.8 and 3.10
>> (on kaiser-discuss backports list) a couple of days ago. That is, like
>> what I sent before for 3.18.72, but with all the fixups and pti= boot
>> option and KAISER->PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION renaming that's come in since
>> (But I cannot bear to go further myself, into retpoline etc, sorry.)
>>
>> Would a 3.18 Kaiser update be helpful, or are you preferring to force
>> people off 3.18 by not providing those updates? Or preferring to wait
>> a bit longer, until 4.4 and 4.9 and 4.14 have settled down?
>
> I'm not recommending anyone use the 3.18 tree unless they know what they
> are doing right now :)
>
> And yes, I would love for them to move off of that tree as soon as
> possible, but usually due to huge out-of-tree SoC patches, they can not
> do that easily, if at all, right now.
>
> So no need for a 3.18 Kaiser update for me at all, I do not need or want
> it.

Okay, that's very clear now - thanks.

Hugh