Linux is a CNA

 Posted on February 13, 2024  |  

As was recently announced, the Linux kernel project has been accepted as a CNA as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for vulnerabilities found in Linux. This is a trend, of more open source projects taking over the haphazard assignments of CVEs against their project by becoming a CNA so that no other group can assign CVEs without their involvment. Here’s the curl project doing much the same thing for the same reasons. [Read More]

8 Bits Are Enough for a Version Number...

 Posted on February 5, 2021  |  

As was pointed out to us stable kernel maintainers last week, the overflow of the .y release number was going to happen soon, and our proposed solution for it (use 16 bits instead of 8), turns out to be breaking a userspace-visable api. As we can’t really break this, I did a release of the 4.4.256 and 4.9.256 releases today that contain nothing but a new version number. See the links for the full technical details if curious. [Read More]

Helping Out With Lts Kernel Releases

 Posted on February 3, 2021  |  

A recent email thread about “Why isn’t the 5.10 stable kernel listed as supported for 6 years yet!” on the linux-kernel mailing list ended up generating a bunch of direct emails to me asking what could different companies and individuals due to help out. What exactly was I looking for here? Instead of having to respond to private emails with the same information over and over, I figured it was better to just put it here so that everyone can see what exactly I am expecting with regards to support in order to be able to maintain a kernel for longer than 2 years: [Read More]

Fast Kernel Builds

 Posted on September 18, 2020  |  

A number of months ago I did an “Ask Me Anything” interview on r/linux on redit. As part of that, a discussion of the hardware I used came up, and someone said, “I know someone that can get you a new machine” “get that person a new machine!” or something like that. Fast forward a few months, and a “beefy” AMD Threadwripper 3970X shows up on my doorstep thanks to the amazing work of Wendell Wilson at Level One Techs. [Read More]

Patch Workflow With Mutt 2019

 Posted on August 14, 2019  |  

Given that the main development workflow for most kernel maintainers is with email, I spend a lot of time in my email client. For the past few decades I have used (mutt), but every once in a while I look around to see if there is anything else out there that might work better. One project that looks promising is (aerc) which was started by (Drew DeVault). It is a terminal-based email client written in Go, and relies on a lot of other go libraries to handle a lot of the “grungy” work in dealing with imap clients, email parsing, and other fun things when it comes to free-flow text parsing that emails require. [Read More]

Linux Stable Tree Mirror at Github

 Posted on June 15, 2019  |  

As everyone seems to like to put kernel trees up on github for random projects (based on the crazy notifications I get all the time), I figured it was time to put up a semi-official mirror of all of the stable kernel releases on github.com It can be found at: https://github.com/gregkh/linux and I will try to keep it up to date with the real source of all kernel stable releases at https://git. [Read More]

What Stable Kernel Should I Use

 Posted on August 24, 2018  |  

I get a lot of questions about people asking me about what stable kernel should they be using for their product/device/laptop/server/etc. all the time. Especially given the now-extended length of time that some kernels are being supported by me and others, this isn’t always a very obvious thing to determine. So this post is an attempt to write down my opinions on the matter. Of course, you are free to use what ever kernel version you want, but here’s what I recommend. [Read More]

Affidavit

 Posted on March 10, 2018  |  

As many people know, last week there was a court hearing in the Geniatech vs. McHardy case. This was a case brought claiming a license violation of the Linux kernel in Geniatech devices in the German court of OLG Cologne. Harald Welte has written up a wonderful summary of the hearing, I strongly recommend that everyone go read that first. In Harald’s summary, he refers to an affidavit that I provided to the court. [Read More]

Linux Kernel Release Model

 Posted on February 5, 2018  |  

Note This post is based on a whitepaper I wrote at the beginning of 2016 to be used to help many different companies understand the Linux kernel release model and encourage them to start taking the LTS stable updates more often. I then used it as a basis of a presentation I gave at the Linux Recipes conference in September 2017 which can be seen here. With the recent craziness of Meltdown and Spectre , I’ve seen lots of things written about how Linux is released and how we handle handles security patches that are totally incorrect, so I figured it is time to dust off the text, update it in a few places, and publish this here for everyone to benefit from. [Read More]

Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status - Update

 Posted on January 19, 2018  |  

I keep getting a lot of private emails about my previous post about the latest status of the Linux kernel patches to resolve both the Meltdown and Spectre issues. These questions all seem to break down into two different categories, “What is the state of the Spectre kernel patches?”, and “Is my machine vunlerable?” State of the kernel patches As always, lwn.net covers the technical details about the latest state of the kernel patches to resolve the Spectre issues, so please go read that to find out that type of information. [Read More]