On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 06:19, Tejas Guruswamy <masterpatricko@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't see why SUSE/Novell has to apply this change to a kernel that was already released to us, in a stable distro. I believe the should simply correct bugs, as they always do, without upgrading the kernel, and leave further changes for factory (or KOTD).
- -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. I think people are missing/forgetting something. This WAS a security
On 26/09/10 21:55, Carlos E. R. wrote: patch - all these changes are associated with CVE 2010-3081 ([1]). It's that massive 32-bit compatibility mode root exploit on 64-bit systems bug that was being discussed last week. This bug was ridiculously nasty and exploitable and a kernel security update had to be pushed out ASAP. Linus's commit: [2].
Here's an explanation of the effects of the change from the debian ML [3]: "compat-alloc-user-space() is only used for syscalls AFAIK. The rule is: you do that, you have to track the kernel. In fact, it is now GPL-only (so, for example, fglrx needs to be modified as it is forbidden from using compat-alloc-user-space()). ... Summary: compat-alloc-user-space() is now EXPORT-SYMBOL-GPL * cannot be used by fglrx and other non-GPL modules * using arch-compat-alloc-user-space() may reopen CVE-2010-3081 if the non-GPL module doesn't do access-ok by itself compat-alloc-user-space() moved from asm/compat.h to linux/compat.h * requires #include changes on out-of-tree modules that use compat-alloc-user-space() for them to build"
And here's a quote from lkml [4]: "compat-alloc-user-space is still a horrible hack and shouldn't be used at all if possible."
The ATI fglrx driver used buggy code - and so had to be changed. A temporary patch was available almost immediately (see Anders's post [6]), and hopefully a better one will be included in the next driver release. This was not some psuedo-religious attempt to smite evil binary drivers, this was a genuine security issue.
Regardless of the merits of having GPL_ONLY kernel code at all (which is a different discussion with very important people with good arguments on both sides), this is what was necessary to fix this bug according to the kernel devs.
What's the big deal? As far as I can tell, both openSUSE and the kernel devs have done a great job fixing a nasty bug very fast. If you want to discuss the merits of having EXPORT-SYMBOL-GPL at all, go to lkml, not here.
Regards, Tejas
[1] http://seclists.org/fulldisclosure/2010/Sep/268 [2] http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=... [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2010/09/msg01708.html [4] http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/9/18/18 [5] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2010-09/msg01489.html -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
So now malicious code marks itself as GPL and nothing is fixed, because it has access to the same API as before. -- Med Vennlig Hilsen, A. Helge Joakimsen -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org