MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength [LWN.net]

MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 6, 2010 17:50 UTC (Mon) by Adi (guest, #52678)
Parent article: MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

It's said to see that Debian has lost in virtually all tests.
Quite an uneasy conclusion for distro so often used on servers.

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MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 6, 2010 18:37 UTC (Mon) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems to me that it's fairly difficult for Debian as an organization to manage to make global settings changes like for those features.

MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 6, 2010 18:50 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

That would be a organizational failure to address. It should be possible to make technical changes consistently across package boundaries especially when it brings obvious benefits like security improvements.

MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 9, 2010 18:33 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

It should be, yes. But it isn't.

Good luck addressing it! People have tried and failed. I hear it's like sending ten thousand similar emails in an attempt to push a wall of jello.

MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 7, 2010 17:15 UTC (Tue) by kees (subscriber, #27264) [Link]

See the thread for yourself. Here is why Debian rejected a global compiler change:

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-devel@lists.debian.org...

MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 6, 2010 19:05 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (1 responses)

The Debian version which was assessed is Lenny (5.0.4).
Perhaps the security level is better with Debian Squeeze (6.0) ?

MWR Labs: Assessing the Tux Strength

Posted Sep 6, 2010 21:42 UTC (Mon) by hmh (subscriber, #3838) [Link]

It is a bit better, but nowhere close to something you'd write home about.

Debian mostly fails where Gentoo succeeds.

Posted Sep 7, 2010 10:26 UTC (Tue) by Alterego (guest, #55989) [Link] (1 responses)

We just need to take a gento hardened-kernel and put it in Debian.

I hope the sync between several distro (to use 2.6.32 kernel) will help to fix this, and avoid duplicate (or useless) efforts from the various maintainers.

Afaik Greg KH is one gentoo kernel maintainer, maybe this can explain several things ?

Debian mostly fails where Gentoo succeeds.

Posted Sep 9, 2010 13:17 UTC (Thu) by blueness (guest, #56336) [Link]

I'm currently maintaining Gentoo's hardened-sources. Ask away.