Am 03.09.2015 23:08 schrieb Marc Schiffbauer:
* Matthew Thode schrieb am 03.09.15 um 21:46 Uhr:
On 09/03/2015 02:28 PM, Marc Schiffbauer wrote:
> * Anthony G. Basile schrieb am 02.09.15 um 18:13 Uhr:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> So by now most people have heard the news that the Grsecurity/PaX team
>> are no longer going to be making their stable patches available. The
>> reason is that they are in dispute with a certain embedded systems
>> vendor and those negotiations broke down. So they decided to make their
>> stable patches only available to the sponsors. [1]
>>
>> What does this mean for Gentoo? Up until now I have been maintaining
>> both the grsec upstream stable and testing patchsets in our
>> hardened-sources. Currently the upstream stable kernels are 3.2.71 and
>> 3.14.51 and the testing are 4.1.6. In about one week, the 3.2.71 and
>> 3.14.51 patchsets will no longer be available and I'll continue pushing
>> out the 4.1.6. Unfortunately the testing patchset is precisely as the
>> name suggests --- for testing and not production. For the embedded
>> systems company this will be the kiss of death because those patches are
>> not suitable for long term. For Gentoo it will mean that I will have to
>> be more vigilant about bugs and trying to stick with a well known kernel
>> before moving on. You can still use these kernels in production, but
>> you must be carefull about instabilities as upstream pushes out
>> experimental feature that may oops or panic. Keep older kernel images
>> around and revert if it doesn't work. Look to this list for
>> announcements about more serious issues like things that can cause data
>> loss.
>>
>> I'm hoping that once this company feels the sting of what has just
>> happened, they'll come back to the table and talk with Grsec/PaX people.
>> They won't be able to ship boards with grsec anymore because its not so
>> easy to switch out a kernel on a board! If they ship a board with a
>> bug, they loose. We just reboot :)
>>
>> [1] https://grsecurity.net/
>
> Can't Gentoo be a sponsor? I think we could easly croudfund a
> sponsorship.
>
> This would help Gentoo and Grsecurty/PaX but OTOH that vendor might just
> use the gentoo kernel if they not already did so.
>
> Thoughts?
>
We can't do that because it would make the LTS patches public, which
spender is trying to avoid.
True and what I wanted to say with the OTOH part. But doesn't this
apply
to any sponsor? I mean we are talking about GPL'ed Software... does the
GPL permit to distribute source under some kind of NDA?
I fully respect their decision but I hope things will be back to normal
again soon.
No you can't override the GPL with an NDA. But a sponsor - who is
selling products based on grsecurity - is not required to make the code
available to the general public, only to the customer who pays for the
product. They're also not required to make their /patches/ available,
only the complete source. So even if you get the sources from a customer
(or you buy the product yourself), you would have to diff the code
against a vanilla kernel - and then you only get a huge patch that
includes *all* changes. Extracting just the grsecurity patch from that
is complicated and error prone. You'll probably run into less bugs if
you just stick to the public testing patches.
Philipp
