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

[Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>]

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.

thanks,

greg k-h