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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

#11

Post by nandhp »

ars wrote: post #5

Can someone say what TSYNC is? Googling it did not help me, lots of links, but none that said what it actually is.

It looks like a "thread-sync" feature for seccomp.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1379020 http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2014-J...

seccomp ("secure computing") is an application sandboxing mechanism in the Linux kernel (since 2.6.12, 2005-03-08). seccomp allows a process to make a one-way transition into a "secure" state where it cannot make any system calls except exit(), sigreturn(), read() and write() to already-open file descriptors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seccomp

Chrome uses seccomp to sandbox rendering subprocesses and the Adobe Flash Player.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#13

Post by eeZi »

rdtsc wrote: post #4

Really, a browser is now dependent on a particular Linux kernel? For example RHEL/CentOS 7 which was released just last year with at least a 10 year support ahead of it is now obsolete according to them because it has a kernel version 3.10... Not that many people are on desktop versions of those OSes, and those that are will not use Chrome (for example, US govt loves them some Desktop RHEL systems, but Chrome is usua…

The feature might very well be backported to 3.10.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#15

Post by krick »

redthrowaway wrote: post #7
jpgvm wrote: post #3

Replies so far for the lazy: On Sat, Mar 07, 2015 at 07:17:13PM +0200, Georgi Naplatanov wrote: > On 03/07/2015 06:38 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 16:09 +0100, D. F. wrote: > >> Hello, Julien Tinnes from google says that next releases of > >> chromium will drops support for kernels without TSYNC > >> ubuntu 14.10 already has been patched > >> Can I to expect that debian 8/jessie will have suppor…

That seems like an exceedingly childish exchange.

It's common way to see things now, although I guess it's pretty normal. I always viewed distro as something people do primarily for themselves, if you want something from particular distro — you join the community. If your wishes are drastically different from what this community accepts — you go to another community or build your own. I'm not saying people should be rude and talk nonsense, but it seems that too many people tend to forget: Debian mailing list (or lkml, or what else people complain about) is not Starbucks or McDonalds where people are paid to smile and do what's requested.

That's been said, I find question about TSYNC completely appropriate, and its support to be expected, but answer about "Google spyware" was funny and enjoyable anyway. So, yeah, maybe childish, but not "exceedingly childish".

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#16

Post by wtallis »

rdtsc wrote: post #4

Really, a browser is now dependent on a particular Linux kernel? For example RHEL/CentOS 7 which was released just last year with at least a 10 year support ahead of it is now obsolete according to them because it has a kernel version 3.10... Not that many people are on desktop versions of those OSes, and those that are will not use Chrome (for example, US govt loves them some Desktop RHEL systems, but Chrome is usua…

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.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#17

Post by teraflop »

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 because there is a reasonable workaround of updating your kernel."

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#18

Post by stingraycharles »

redthrowaway wrote: post #7
jpgvm wrote: post #3

Replies so far for the lazy: On Sat, Mar 07, 2015 at 07:17:13PM +0200, Georgi Naplatanov wrote: > On 03/07/2015 06:38 PM, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > On Sat, 2015-03-07 at 16:09 +0100, D. F. wrote: > >> Hello, Julien Tinnes from google says that next releases of > >> chromium will drops support for kernels without TSYNC > >> ubuntu 14.10 already has been patched > >> Can I to expect that debian 8/jessie will have suppor…

That seems like an exceedingly childish exchange.

I cannot believe these are the actual people responsible for Debian. Is this unprofessional attitude common in the Debian community?

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#19

Post by username223 »

wtallis wrote: post #16
rdtsc wrote: post #4

Really, a browser is now dependent on a particular Linux kernel? For example RHEL/CentOS 7 which was released just last year with at least a 10 year support ahead of it is now obsolete according to them because it has a kernel version 3.10... Not that many people are on desktop versions of those OSes, and those that are will not use Chrome (for example, US govt loves them some Desktop RHEL systems, but Chrome is usua…

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.

> When you commit to a 10-year support cycle, you'd better be prepared to backport quite a few things.

OTOH, when you make a break-the-world release every six weeks, you can expect lots of breakage when dealing with the rest of the world. From what I can tell, Google pushed a feature they wanted into Linux, then didn't bother to think about backward compatibility. This would be fine if Chrome weren't force-updating software -- people on older kernels could just wait and update when they updated their kernels -- but alas that is not the case.

Re: Google Chromium drops support for Linux 3.16 and earlier

#20

Post by comex »

rdtsc wrote: post #4

Really, a browser is now dependent on a particular Linux kernel? For example RHEL/CentOS 7 which was released just last year with at least a 10 year support ahead of it is now obsolete according to them because it has a kernel version 3.10... Not that many people are on desktop versions of those OSes, and those that are will not use Chrome (for example, US govt loves them some Desktop RHEL systems, but Chrome is usua…

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 here is related to a new seccomp feature. I don't know whether it's reasonable to drop support for older kernels, but it's no surprise that Chrome is using the latest and greatest in kernel sandboxing support.
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