Meltdown and Spectre Linux Kernel Status

 Posted on January 6, 2018  |  

By now, everyone knows that something “big” just got announced regarding computer security. Heck, when the Daily Mail does a report on it , you know something is bad… Anyway, I’m not going to go into the details about the problems being reported, other than to point you at the wonderfully written Project Zero paper on the issues involved here. They should just give out the 2018 Pwnie award right now, it’s that amazingly good. [Read More]

Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement

 Posted on October 16, 2017  |  

By Greg Kroah-Hartman, Chris Mason, Rik van Riel, Shuah Khan, and Grant Likely The Linux kernel ecosystem of developers, companies and users has been wildly successful by any measure over the last couple decades. Even today, 26 years after the initial creation of the Linux kernel, the kernel developer community continues to grow, with more than 500 different companies and over 4,000 different developers getting changes merged into the tree during the past year. [Read More]

Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement FAQ

 Posted on October 16, 2017  |  

Based on the recent Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement and the article describing the background and what it means , here are some Questions/Answers to help clear things up. These are based on questions that came up when the statement was discussed among the initial round of over 200 different kernel developers. Q: Is this changing the license of the kernel? A: No. Q: Seriously? It really looks like a change to the license. [Read More]

4.14 == This Years LTS Kernel

 Posted on September 6, 2017  |  

As the 4.13 release has now happened, the merge window for the 4.14 kernel release is now open. I mentioned this many weeks ago, but as the word doesn’t seem to have gotten very far based on various emails I’ve had recently, I figured I need to say it here as well. So, here it is officially, 4.14 should be the next LTS kernel that I’ll be supporting with stable kernel patch backports for at least two years, unless it really is a horrid release and has major problems. [Read More]

4.9 == Next Lts Kernel

 Posted on September 6, 2016  |  

As I briefly mentioned a few weeks ago on my G+ page, the plan is for the 4.9 Linux kernel release to be the next “Long Term Supported” (LTS) kernel. Last year, at the Linux Kernel Summit, we discussed just how to pick the LTS kernel. Many years ago, we tried to let everyone know ahead of time what the kernel version would be, but that caused a lot of problems as people threw crud in there that really wasn’t ready to be merged, just to make it easier for their “day job”. [Read More]

Kdbus Details

 Posted on January 15, 2014  |  

Now that linux.conf.au is over, there has been a bunch of information running around about the status of kdbus and the integration of it with systemd. So, here’s a short summary of what’s going on at the moment. Lennart Poettering gave a talk about kdbus at linux.conf.au. The talk can be viewed here, and the slides are here. Go read the slides and watch the talk, odds are, most of your questions will be answered there already. [Read More]

Binary Blos to C Structures

 Posted on September 11, 2013  |  

Sometimes you don’t have access to vim’s wonderful xxd tool, and you need to use it to generate some .c code based on a binary file. This happened to me recently when packaging up the EFI signing tools for Gentoo. Adding a build requirement of vim for a single autogenerated file was not an option for some users, so I created a perl version of the xxd -i command line tool. [Read More]

Booting a Self Signed Linux Kernel

 Posted on September 2, 2013  |  

Now that The Linux Foundation is a member of the UEFI.org group, I’ve been working on the procedures for how to boot a self-signed Linux kernel on a platform so that you do not have to rely on any external signing authority. After digging through the documentation out there, it turns out to be relatively simple in the end, so here’s a recipe for how I did this, and how you can duplicate it yourself on your own machine. [Read More]

Longterm Kernel 3.10

 Posted on August 4, 2013  |  

As I’ve discussed in the past, I will be selecting one “longterm stable” kernel release every year, and maintain that kernel release for at least two years. Despite the fact that the 3.10-stable kernel releases are not slowing down at all, and there are plenty of pending patches already lined up for the next few releases, I figured it was a good time to let everyone know now that I’m picking the 3. [Read More]

3.10 Kernel Development Rate

 Posted on July 1, 2013  |  

While working on the latest statistics for the yearly Linux Foundation “Who Writes Linux” paper, I noticed the rate-of-change for the 3.10 kernel release that just happened this weekend: Every year I think we can’t go faster, and every year I’m wrong. Note, the “number of employers” row is not correct, I haven’t updated those numbers yet, that takes a lot more work, which I will be doing this week. [Read More]