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Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

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11–20 of 172 posts

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#11
The grsecurity team does have some valid criticisms of the upstream community, and of course they've done some brilliant technical work, but spender is unfortunately a pretty toxic community member who puts many upstream kernel devs to shame when it comes to ability to flame.

It's a shame - there's a lot of good stuff in grsec/PaX, but I think the upstream community is better off without the people involved. The KSPP effort to upstream grsec/PaX features is, of course, a good thing.

[disclaimer: upstream developer who lurks on kernel-hardening]

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#12
Linus, and this stubborn attitude of his, is the reason that Linux will always lag behind Windows in kernel security.

With the vast security improvements Microsoft are putting into their operating system year on year, it's a shame to see Linux failing to keep up.

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#13

It's a struggle to respect the security opinions of someone who has actively admitted that he thinks "[security] bugs are just bugs". [0] Personally, I find it quite hard to respect Linus generally - his offensive personality is clearly not something that would be appropriate coming from anyone else in any community, but for some reason he gets a free ride for being a difficult genius. 0. http://www.washingtonpost.co…

Nooooooo! Now we have to listen to the "what is an OS?" semantic flamewar!

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#14

Linus, and this stubborn attitude of his, is the reason that Linux will always lag behind Windows in kernel security. With the vast security improvements Microsoft are putting into their operating system year on year, it's a shame to see Linux failing to keep up.

I'm upcoming you for good comedy.

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#15
post #4

Linus has cried wolf too many times. His outbursts about garbage patches are no longer believable.

Can you point to specific times? I want to dig into this more.

Google Linus rant. There are many examples.

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#16
I'm an Arch user and I have no idea what's going on with security-focused kernels these days. I was running the grsecurity kernel package but that was recently replaced by a "linux-hardened" package that I had never heard of. Then, a pacman update tonight installed a plain Linux kernel. It's very confusing. Not unexpected for Arch but there is so little on the wiki about this.

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#17

Linus, and this stubborn attitude of his, is the reason that Linux will always lag behind Windows in kernel security. With the vast security improvements Microsoft are putting into their operating system year on year, it's a shame to see Linux failing to keep up.

Bleh. There are enough NSA backdoors in implanted within Windows to the point that any sane person regards Microsoft security as pure theater.

Secrets aren't actually secrets in Windows at all.

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#18
post #6

Grsecurity wouldn't exist if Linux made security a priority. It doesn't, because backwards compatibility and features is more important to them. It doesn't mean because Linus says something so strongly on a subject is right or wrong, he is generally abusive and rants and has for years. Grsecurity is important to some people, not all, and vice versa for the features and backwards compatibility crowd. Personally I'd ho…

To be even weakly fair, access is a component of security. If their patches break software, they would be breaking someone's security.

That is, backwards compatibility deserves that high bar. Ideally, you could get security without breaking things. If you can't, at least use care and take incremental steps to get things in.

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#19

Linus, and this stubborn attitude of his, is the reason that Linux will always lag behind Windows in kernel security. With the vast security improvements Microsoft are putting into their operating system year on year, it's a shame to see Linux failing to keep up.

With a username of "windows_lover", what can I say?

Re: Linus: Don't bother with grsecurity. Their patches are pure garbage

#20

Linus, and this stubborn attitude of his, is the reason that Linux will always lag behind Windows in kernel security. With the vast security improvements Microsoft are putting into their operating system year on year, it's a shame to see Linux failing to keep up.

Bleh. There are enough NSA backdoors in implanted within Windows to the point that any sane person regards Microsoft security as pure theater. Secrets aren't actually secrets in Windows at all.

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