Kees Cook: yay for barriers

I have mixed feelings on the issue. Kees didn't really do anything wrong. Ted said that Fedora doesn't have the problem, so I think anyone's natural reaction would be to test Fedora and then, if it didn't have the problem, bisect the patches. Then he linked the upstream bug so Fedora guys essentially had no overhead in finding the fix and closing the bug.

However, the fact remains that Eric Sandeen, a Red Hat employee, did a good deal of root cause analysis on the bug. Was this bug more deserving of his attention than the 1628 other bugs for fedora+kernel that are presumably impacting fedora users? Or the bugs filed against RHEL+kernel that paying customers want fixed?

The short answer is that he would have gotten involved anyway since he's an upstream dev, and the bug was also filed against upstream. And Kees may have done a lot to help out Red Hat here, after all he did a lot of analysis and found a reproducer, which is a mundane and time consuming job. Maybe the per-bdi thread flush patch is in RHEL 6, and Red Hat wouldn't have caught it until after a customer hit it. Then Red Hat has to do all of Kees work anyhow, and the customer leaves with a bad taste in their mouth. Or maybe no one would have hit it in any Red Hat distro. Who knows?

The point is that Kees did the right thing, and Fedora has a right to be miffed. Not that they are, mind you. As others have pointed out, almost none of the criticism has come from Fedora devs.