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Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

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Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#71

Post by greggman »

gsnedders wrote: post #31
comex wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome isn't your average application, though - it pioneered the modern use of tight process sandboxes in general (in client-side applications, anyway), and in particular was the biggest motivating client for (and Kees Cook on Chrome OS Security wrote some of the code for) seccomp-bpf, the ~3-year-old sandboxing mechanism that allows precise control of permitted syscalls and syscall arguments. The incompatibility her…

Chrome did? IE7 shipped with pretty tight sandboxing in 2006 — and Chrome was only announced in 2008!

well let's see. in 2014 there were 214 code exploits in IE vs 4 in Chrome. I don't think IE's sandbox can really be considered tight

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/9900/Microsoft-Internet-Ex...

http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#72

Post by erglkjahlkh »

reidrac wrote: post #69
colechristensen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 months. Linux 3.16 is 7 months old. The attitude of the Chrome team is extremely obnoxious. Some distributions support versions 10 years and beyond and there are plenty of reasonable reasons to want to use them as such. Requiring a 7 month old kernel is absurd. I keep getting the feeling that Chrome isn't the browser for me.

Without defending Chrome team here; when a distro provides long time support (say > 1 year) I don't think is upstream responsibility to support the packages for that period of time. If the distro is upgrading the browser package I think that may break the API/ABI stability that a long time support distribution should provide, so I can't see why this is a Chrome problem. Also it sounds wrong that a web browser depends…

Well put. Although someone makes a LTS distribution, it really does not mean 3rd parties would be compelled or required to support that steadily aging platform.

When you combine the fact that not even Ubuntu developers really support the LTS (9/10 of the developers flock to the newest release, and the bug reports towards LTS get generally ignored - the LTS tagged bug queues are graveyards), I can not see the whole point of making LTS version available in the first place.

That being said, 7 months is a bit small window of support for a specific platform component. I would understand not supporting 1-2 years old kernel/glibc/whatever, but 7 months is really not enough.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#73

Post by plantain »

honestthrowaway wrote: post #37
redthrowaway wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like an exceedingly childish exchange.

To be fair Google's whole business model is based on spying on people to gather data for ad placement. If we're being entirely honest a browser which sends every url you visit to Google by default is spyware.

>If we're being entirely honest a browser which sends every url you visit to Google by default is spyware.

[citation needed]

Blatantly false.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#74

Post by teekert »

Perhaps it is a good things. Many kernel devs aparently don't like the method of back porting fixes for ages the way Debian does. They say the Arch way is fine and one should not be too afraid to upgrade in between. Perhaps Debian could start trying this? In other words, is the Debian stable method still needed in this day and age? Perhaps a good start for a discussion.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#75

Post by jrockway »

I don't think Chromium has dropped support for kernels It appears a patch needs to be cherry-picked back; a pretty common task for people that maintain older kernels. It's very common to backport patches to drivers you care about (because new kernel versions always introduce bugs in your obscure hardware, you only backport stuff that doesn't already work). There is even a system for doing it in an automated manner: http://drvbp1.linux-foundation.org/~mcgrof/rel-html/backport...

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#76

Post by davidw »

johnsea wrote: post #68
jfoster wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but most people would consider the original poster's request as quite reasonable. Instead of considering it in a balanced way and producing a polite & considered response, the response was idealistic rhetoric. For better or worse, I think that does qualify the attitude of response as "unprofessional", as stingraycharles pointed out.

Google is the unprofessional one. Threaten to not support Jessie, hey? What an arrogant self-referred world Google lives in?

I think Google is more or less "in the wrong" too, but a less snippy, snarky response would probably do more to convince people of that. "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar", as they say.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#77

Post by lrem »

vacri wrote: post #63
fpgeek wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I'll note that plenty of people use Chrome without extensions. This issue wasn't a showstopper for any of them. Second, you cut out the rest of the comment: "If that causes great hardship for anyone and you want to do the work to figure out what's going on submit patches to fix it, I can provide pointers for where to start looking and code reviews for the patch." Since that comment has anyone done anything oth…

So you only care about problems if the user is a skilled developer, and then only if they're actively solving the bug (because skilled programmers are never involved in other projects eating their time...)?

I'm pretty sure that's the exact audience they had in mind when opensourcing (note that closed-source Chrome is still available for Linux).

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#78

Post by cookiecaper »

colechristensen wrote: post #32
teraflop wrote: post #17

Chrome "unofficially" dropped support for pre-3.16 kernels, such as the kernel in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, about half a year ago. More precisely, they introduced a bug that caused installing extensions to fail with that kernel, and then declined to fix it. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=401655 See comment #47: "Ok, while it sounds like this is technically a regression, I'm going to mark this as Wontfix…

7 months. Linux 3.16 is 7 months old. The attitude of the Chrome team is extremely obnoxious. Some distributions support versions 10 years and beyond and there are plenty of reasonable reasons to want to use them as such. Requiring a 7 month old kernel is absurd. I keep getting the feeling that Chrome isn't the browser for me.

7 months is too short, but 10 years is too long to go for a workstation, which is where Chrome would be used.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#80

Post by kjksf »

igravious wrote: post #62
wtallis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you commit to a 10-year support cycle, you'd better be prepared to backport quite a few things. Google's being aggressive about taking advantage of a kernel-level security feature that they developed to solve a real problem. This seems like a good thing overall.

It'd be nice if they used some of their massive pile of cash to back-port that feature and generate a ton of good will.

Google does a lot of Linux kernel work, a lot of gcc work, a lot of clang work, open-sources monumental amounts of code, pays several hundred students to work on open-source during summer.

If that's not enough to "generate a ton of good will" then doing one more minor thing won't change anything.

If they start giving out hundred dollar bills, you'll be complaining that it's not two hundred dollar bills.

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