This article is more than 1 year old

Linus Torvalds slams 'pure garbage' from 'clowns' at Grsecurity

'I stopped trying to be polite about their BS', says Torvalds who plans Linux 4.12 next week

Linux lord Linus Torvalds thinks he'll be able to give the world version 4.12 of the Linux kernel next week.

In his post to mark the release of 4.12 release candidate seven, Torvalds wrote “It's fairly small, and there were no huge surprises, so if nothing untoward happens this upcoming week, this will be the final rc.”

“But as usual, I reserve the right to just drag things out if I end up feeling uncomfortable about things for any reason including just random gut feelings, so we'll see.”

Torvalds generally prefers seven release candidates per release and grumbles a bit if a release needs more, so The Register reckons we'll see a new release next week.

One thing we won't see is Torvalds bending over backwards to help Grsecurity, maker of an eponymous collection of Linux kernel security enhancements.

Torvalds last week weighed in to a kernel mailing list thread thread titled “mm: larger stack guard gap, between vmas” that addressed the kind of memory messes last week revealed as a persistent *nix security issue. As the thread burbled along a developer named Andy Lutomirski asked “Has anyone checked how Grsecurity deals with this? I think they have a large stack guard gap.”

Here's Torvalds' response:

Don't bother with Grsecurity.

Their approach has always been "we don't care if we break anything, we'll just claim it's because we're extra secure".

The thing is a joke, and they are clowns. When they started talking about people taking advantage of them, I stopped trying to be polite about their bullshit.

Their patches are pure garbage.

Linus

Tell us what you really think next time, Linus! ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like