Welcome to 2018 [LWN.net]

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 2, 2018 22:20 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935)
Parent article: Welcome to 2018

Jon, you're too optimistic. My bet is that handset vendors will ignore PTI just fine, no matter how important it turns out to be (not all SoCs will be affected anyway), and most of their customers will be none the wiser.

Hopefully they will get closer to mainline kernels in due time, but if that happens it will be only because Google forces them, and not because of a sudden crush for their customers' security.

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Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 3:55 UTC (Wed) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link] (2 responses)

PTI appears to be a solution to an Intel-only (huge) problem. Handsets vendors are safe to ignore it for now.

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 17:13 UTC (Wed) by pdewacht (subscriber, #47633) [Link] (1 responses)

I wouldn't dare say that yet, ARM is pushing an ARM64 KPTI patch: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/6/306

Welcome to 2018

Posted Jan 3, 2018 17:44 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

On the other hand that says "I'd like to start thinking about getting this merged for 4.16.", which sounds like the kind of relaxed attitude one might expect for a mostly-hypothetical KASLR-bypass issue that nobody is really worried about, and unlike the surprising urgency around the Intel KPTI patches.

(On the other other hand, not all handsets are ARM - some use Intel Atom SoCs, and might or might not be affected by this.)