Kernel.org's road to recovery

That commit does not have much risk of causing a regression, so the threshold for justifying it on security grounds does not have to be very high. So let's see:

I would say that the security impact in the context of a 3.1-rc9 kernel is positive, since it documents (through the output of commands such as "uname -a") that the kernel follows a certain well documented set of behaviors and sysadmins can act accordingly. On the other hand, backporting that patch to a 3.0.y stable kernel would have severe negative security impact, because it would create a false impression that bugs affecting v3.0 and not affecting v3.1-rc9 have been fixed. Even looking at this from the point of view of security alone, I am glad that commit was not tagged with "Cc: stable".

Hope that helps.