[gentoo-dev] Regarding the State of PaX in the tree

["Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@gentoo.org>]

Hi everyone,

Magnus (aka Zorry) and I have been talking about what to do with PaX in
the Gentoo tree.  A year ago, grsecurity.net upstream stopped providing
open versions of their patches to the community and this basically
brought an end to sys-kernel/hardened-sources.  I waited a while before
masking the package in the hope that upstream might reconsider.  There
were also some forks but I didn't have much confidence in them.  I'm not
sure that any of these forks have been able to keep up past
meltdown/specter.

It may be time to remove sys-kernel/hardened-sources completely from the
tree.  Removing the package is easy, but the issue is there is a lot of
machinery in the tree that revolves around supporting a PaX kernel.
This involves things like setting PaX flags on some executables either
by touching the ELF program headers or the file's extended attributes,
or applying custom patches.

The question then is, do we remove all this code?  As thing stands, its
just lint that serves no current purpose, so removing it would clean
things up.  The disadvantage is it would be a pita to ever restore it if
we ever wanted it back.  While upstream doesn't provide their patch for
free, some users/companies can purchase the grsecurity patches and still
use a custom hardened-sources kernel with Gentoo.  But since we haven't
been able to test the pax markings/custom patches in about a year, its
hard to say how useful that code might still be.

I'm just emailing everyone to get advice.


-- 
Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Gentoo Linux Developer [Hardened]
E-Mail    : blueness@gentoo.org
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