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Personalities and history of GRsecurity not taken seriously in the past led to a grumpy Spender who now has a hard time collaborating with kernel.org when they
by cm3 10y ago
Personalities and history of GRsecurity not taken seriously in the past led to a grumpy Spender who now has a hard time collaborating with kernel.org when they are actually funding work in the space. At least that's my impression from following this for years.
HardenedBSD tried to upstream their ASLR patch and the developer didn't manage to address the patch review comments (if you check the Phabricator ticket) and another FreeBSD kernel dev (Belousuv) contributed his ASLR patch upstream in FreeBSD-11. Before this happened, HardendedBSD decided to not try upstreaming stuff, but they still, like GRsecurity, have very useful security enhancements and it only hurts FreeBSD users having to decide between FreeBSD and HardednedBSD (or a HardendedBSD variant of FreeNSD or OPNSense).
I know firsthand how strong personalities can be very hard to work with if you cannot get your technical argument across, so I don't really blame Spender, but it's a disservice to all users. It's not like music where you can listen to both bands. A computer starts up with one kernel at a time.
It might actually help to get the PaX/GRsecurity team and core kernel lieutenants in a room for a couple hours to talk it out and realize they're not disagreeing.
- kev009 10y agoHardenedBSD is some young people that have very little experience with C and computer architecture picking bones against some people in the FreeBSD community who have that experience in spades and becoming angsty and upset that they are unable to meet requisites for merge. Altering the VM doesn't happen quickly, especially when you have no track record of working on that subsystem. Comparing HBSD to grsecurity is insulting to grsecurity, there is no similarity.
- cm3 10y agoThat wasn't my impression, but I'm not qualified to judge the diffs on the code level, so I'll note that their changes may possibly be of lower quality than they are advertised.