Mike Pagano's Weblog http://www.mpagano.com/blog My Digital Contribution Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:23:49 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 Kernel Maintenance Help Part 2 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=167 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=167#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 23:32:10 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=167 Many years ago, the Gentoo kernel lead asked for help.  2 people responded.  I was one of them.  So I figured if I got 2-3 people and one stuck around, I would be in good shape.

This time, I got 26 people responding offering their help. Four of which are currently Gentoo developers. First, I’d like to thank everyone that responded. I was extremely surprised.

Now, since I cannot mentor 22 people at the same time I need to think of a plan.  I’m hoping to lean on the Gentoo developers, as they are already developers and will need a fraction of the instructions that the others will.  This is not a slight on anyone’s ability, just the whole Gentoo Way(tm) thing will not have to be taught to these folks.  They can also commit todayfor eclass changes and bump kernels as needed. Also, if everything goes well, they can help me mentor who from the other 19 want to follow through the entire process.

I’m going to try to get everyone started triaging bugs and then go from there. Thanks again, everyone. Expect an email from me very soon.

 

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=167 1 Looking for help with kernel maintenance http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=165 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=165#comments Fri, 06 Jul 2012 13:57:35 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=165 Once again, the Gentoo Source kernel team is looking for one or more people to help out with Gentoo-sources maintenance. Currently, I am the sole maintainer of our primary supported kernel and from the email complaints I have been receiving lately, I am just about treading water.

Maintaining the kernel consists of a few jobs:

- Bumping Gentoo sources to keep consistent with upstream releases. I can only support three versions (used to be 2 version supported, with more people)  of the kernel at any time. Right now I try to support 3.0, 3.2 and 3.4. When 3.5 comes out, one of those will drop off.

- Kernel Bugs. At the least, I try to help identify patches from upstream to back port to supported kernels to solve issues. Actually digging into kernel code to solve issues is the most time consuming part of the job. Unfortunately, my time constraints lately don’t allow much time for this anymore. The time to dig deeply and solve these issues is always an unknown, and better steered to keeping up to date kernels available for Gentoo as I am the only person.

I would like someone who at least thinks she/he is going to stick around for awhile. The last few people who were on the kernel team lasted around 6 months.

I’m going to steal an old developers call for help:

I’m looking for someone with at least:
- Interest in kernel stuff, or a desire to become interested
- Time to put towards the tasks
- Enthusiasm to ask lots of questions rather than let stuff sit around
- Basic experience with Bugzilla
- Basic kernel experience (i.e. you can compile your own)

Having knowledge of kernel internals or experience with kernel hacking are NOT requirements because if you have time, interest and ask a lot of questions then these will come anyway. A lot of the work doesn’t involve technical stuff, plus I was certainly very clueless about all this when I originally got involved a few years ago.

Being an existing Gentoo developer is not a requirement. Most of the work is done on Bugzilla and via email. This may be a good opportunity to get involved with development and later become a Gentoo developer for those that are interested.

It’s an enjoyable task, you get to interact with a lot of very intelligent people upstream and you end up learning a lot.

If you think you’re interested, you can email me or find me on IRC at #gentoo-kernel

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=165 5 Update: Linux Local Privilege Escalation via SUID http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=163 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=163#comments Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:06:35 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=163 Seems the patch I committed for the fix was corrupted.  So, I am rebuilding and releasing kernels for 3.2 , 3.1 and 3.0.

Thanks for wired for pointing this out.  I will be removing the ones from yesterday.

The following kernels now contain the fix:

gentoo-sources-3.2.1-r2

gentoo-sources-3.1.10-r1

gentoo-sources-3.0.17-r2

 

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=163 1 Gentoo Kernel release for Linux Local Privilege Escalation via SUID /proc/pid/mem http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=160 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=160#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:33:50 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=160 I just released gentoo-sources-3.2.1-r1 for Linux Local Privilege Escalation via SUID /proc/pid/mem .

I plan on creating releases for additional kernels with this patch through the day.

See the link for more info on the privilege escalation.

The following kernel versions contain the patch:

gentoo-sources-3.2.1-r1

gentoo-sources-3.1.10

gentoo-sources-3.0.17-r1

 

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=160 4 Gentoo users with RAID10 running Linux kernel 3.1.0 please read http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=158 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=158#comments Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:04:59 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=158 Attention Gentoo RAID10 users running Linux kernel 3.1.0.

There is a serious bug introduced in the 3.1.0 code. The Gentoo Kernel Team advises any of our RAID10 users running 3.1.0 (vanilla or gentoo-sources) to patch their kernel or immediately upgrade to gentoo-sources-3.1.0-r1 which includes the upstream patch to correct the issue.

Upstream considers this a “serious flaw”.

From the original patch submission on LKML:

“Anyone running RAID10 with 3.1 is advised to either apply this patch or revert an earlier kernel as soon as possible. In the mean time, remove any hot spares from an RAID10 array.”

From the patch:

“It would normally be possible to recover the data, but that would need care and is not guaranteed.”

Summary: RAID10 3.1.0 kernel users, please upgrade to gentoo-sources-3.1.0-r1 or patch your kernel manually.

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=158 4 Linux 3.0 released for Gentoo http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=156 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=156#comments Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:12:31 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=156 Linux 3.0 is now released for Gentoo users in both vanilla and gentoo-source versions. These two ebuilds should be hitting the mirrors in the next few hours.

Currently, deblob support is not available due to the kernel tarball being named 3.0 and the deblob script being 3.0.0. The eclass needs to be looked at to see how to handle this. It would be helpful if everything was named either 3.0 or 3.0.0. A mix makes things a bit more challenging.

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=156 6 Gentoo-sources 2.6.38 released http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=154 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=154#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:44:56 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=154 Just a quick note to announce gentoo-sources-2.6.38 has been released which includes the fbcondecor patch. Also note that the per-session group scheduling patch is included in this release from upstream. I also committed vanilla-sources-2.6.38, as well.

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=154 5 Kernel Econet root exploit http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=151 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=151#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 02:24:20 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=151 The Gentoo Kernel Team (thanks, asn!) have released 3 patched kernels that cover the Econet root exploit described at: http://lwn.net/Articles/419141/

This covers (CVE-2010-3850), (CVE-2010-3849) and (CVE-2010-4258).

The following gentoo-sources contain the fixes: gentoo-sources-2.6.36-r4, gentoo-sources-2.6.35-r14 and gentoo-sources-2.6.32-r23.

Edit: 2.6.36-r4, not r6, which does not exist, yet.

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=151 5 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=149 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=149#comments Sun, 21 Nov 2010 01:39:38 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=149 If you haven’t heard about the new ~200 line patch which, for some users, has improved interactivity on the desktop, you can read about it here.

I have released a masked version of gentoo-sources (gentoo-sources-2.6.36-r2) which contains the backport to this kernel version written by the original author.

If anyone wants to try this patch on 2.6.36, you can just unmask gentoo-sources-2.6.36-r2, and try it out.

Mike

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=149 9 Gentoo Patches for Kernel vulnerability CVE-2010-3904 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=146 http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=146#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 23:57:54 +0000 admin http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?p=146 Attention all Media, Gentoo users and my fellow Gentoo devs:

A new  kernel vulnerability has been reported and the gentoo bug has been filed. Within 4 hours of this filing, the kernel team has released the following:

The fix for CVE-2010-3904 has been back ported to all gentoo-source versions that are currently supported. (2.6.32-rX, 2.6.34-rX and 2.6.35-rX)

This fix is now released in the following genpatches:

genpatches-2.6.35-12
genpatches-2.6.34-14
genpatches-2.6.32-25

The following newly released gentoo-sources kernels contain the patch:

gentoo-sources-2.6.35-r11
gentoo-sources-2.6.34-r12
gentoo-sources-2.6.32-r20

The following stable request bugs have been filed for these kernels:

bug #341833 for gentoo-sources-2.6.32-r20
bug #341831 for gentoo-sources-2.6.34-r12

Please note that no stable request has been filed for 2.6.35-r11, as we wait for the prerequisite 30 days for the new baselayout to be requested to be stabled before we can do so.   If you are running a 2.6.35 gentoo-source kernel, please upgrade to the latest version. Note that as of this post, upstream has not released new vanilla kernel versions containing the fix.

]]> http://www.mpagano.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=146 5