Kernel

Somehow I missed this when it was first posted (Feb. 24th, 2015) from the Collaboration Summit 2015... but here it is... Jon Corbet's most recent Kernel Report. Enjoy!

LinuxCon Japan is happening this week so hopefully an updated report soon?

Jon Corbet from Linux Weekly News gave a refreshed Linux Kernel Report at the LinuxCon Europe 2012 recently. I think I've posted every Kernel Report Jon has given in the last couple of years so why stop now?

Here's a link to the webm.

Jonathan Corbet also gave his traditional The Kernel Report presentation at LCA 2011. I've embedded it below in webm format using the HTML 5 video tag.

If you don't see the video embedded, you can download it and play it locally.

Right-click download link: LCA2011-Kernel_Report.webm (50 min, 131 MB)

I'm a long time reader and subscriber to LWN (Linux Weekly News). LWN is probably the best Linux news site out there with regards to covering kernel development and I often find myself eating up considerable amounts of time sifting through their articles. This week they had an article covering some recent progress in the mainline kernel on checkpointing and restoring of processes and containers of processes... and I wrote a somewhat lengthy response that I decided to share here. I would link to the LWN's original article but it won't be anonymously accessible until next week.

Here's a video presentation by Greg Kroah Hartman on the development model of the Linux kernel. There are some interesting stats to be found.

This video comes from the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group and is dated Nov. 7, 2007. Pretty darn interesting for us non-programmer types who want a better idea of the structure of the Linux kernel.

Just so you are aware... two days ago a bug was announced in Linux kernels 2.6.17 and above... that will give a local user root access. Here's info with the exploit code:

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/27704/info

I have verified that the exploit compiles and works. I was able to get root on stock Fedora, RHEL and CentOS machines running the 2.6.18 or above kernels. Supposedly all distros running a 2.6.17 or later kernel are affected... even those running with the grsecurity patches.

I was unable to get root on an OpenVZ patched kernel but the exploit did cause a kernel panic that locked the machine I tried it on. I didn't want to crash any more machines so I didn't try any more. I've heard (but have not verified) that Linux-Vserver is affected on both the host node and inside of containers although exploits done within containers only get root of the container and are still trapped inside of it. Your milage may vary. Kernels prior to 2.6.17 are not affected. I hope vendors have fixes for this RSN... although I have heard that the current fix is not complete.

Update: The bug got fixed upstream late Sunday... and has found its way into a number of distro updates including Debian, rPath, Fedora, and PCLinuxOS. Red Hat, after the QA process, just released this morning (Tuesday). It seems that distros or kernel releases based on distro release updates will take a bit longer... CentOS and OpenVZ for example.

Update: 02/13/08 CentOS has released updated kernel packages.