From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261234AbVAMR0Z (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:26:25 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261295AbVAMRYB (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:24:01 -0500 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:11697 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261234AbVAMRTn (ORCPT ); Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:19:43 -0500 Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 09:19:16 -0800 (PST) From: Linus Torvalds To: Arjan van de Ven cc: Christoph Hellwig , Dave Jones , Andrew Morton , marcelo.tosatti@cyclades.com, Greg KH , chrisw@osdl.org, Alan Cox , Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: thoughts on kernel security issues In-Reply-To: <1105635662.6031.35.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> Message-ID: References: <20050112185133.GA10687@kroah.com> <20050112161227.GF32024@logos.cnet> <20050112205350.GM24518@redhat.com> <20050112182838.2aa7eec2.akpm@osdl.org> <20050113033542.GC1212@redhat.com> <20050113082320.GB18685@infradead.org> <1105635662.6031.35.camel@laptopd505.fenrus.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 13 Jan 2005, Arjan van de Ven wrote: > > I think you are somewhat misguided on these: the randomisation done in > FC does NOT prohibit prelink for working, with the exception of special > PIE binaries. Does this destroy the randomisation? No: prelink *itself* > randomizes the addresses when creating it's prelink database There was a kernel-based randomization patch floating around at some point, though. I think it's part of PaX. That's the one I hated. Although I haven't seen it in a long time, so you may well be right that that one too is fine. My point was really more about the generic issue of me being two-faced: I'll encourage people to do things that I don't actually like myself in the standard kernel. I just think that forking at some levels is _good_. I like the fact that different vendors have different objectives, and that there are things like Immunix and PaX etc around. Of course, the problem that sometimes results in is the very fact that because I encourage others to have special patches, they en dup not even trying to feed back _parts_ of them. In this case I really believe that was the case. There are fixes in PaX that make sense for the standard kernel. But because not _all_ of PaX makes sense for the standard kernel, and because I will _not_ take their patch whole-sale, they apparently believe (incorrectly) that I wouldn't even take the non-intrusive fixes, and haven't really even tried to feed them back. (Yes, Brad Spengler has talked to me about PaX, but never sent me individual patches, for example. People seem to expect me to take all or nothing - and there's a _lot_ of pretty extreme people out there that expect everybody else to be as extreme as they are..) Linus