What's this, you suggest? Linus Torvalds and the kernel project in general not getting along with a serious security project? Why, I never!
Torvalds does great work. Spengler does great work. The kernel team does great work. The PaX team does great work. Torvalds is not always the easiest person to get along with. Spengler is not always the easiest person to get along with. Life is sometimes complicated. None of this takes away from anyone's achievements.
Thing is that the day Torvalds push a kernel that break some big name production environment is the day either the update gets ignored (effectively forking the kernel), or the big name goes looking for alternative platforms.
You see this back and forth happening over at Windows as well where continued backwards compatibility is weighed against future security.
Just look at the more restricted capabilities of anything WUP vs Win32 (never mind Win16).
PaX is developed independently from and usually shipped with grsec patches. AFAICT Spengler's not directly involved, and Torvald's comments don't reflect on them.
Where does one obtain up to date PaX patches other than rolled into grsecurity? I looked and couldn't find it.
See my other post -- those patches were pulled back when the -stable tree was pulled, although you could previously get them separately, if you were daring.
Re:Passing the Baton
by hackermailman on Wednesday April 26, 2017 @11:32AM
(#14203828)
Every post on lwn or mailing lists by "PaXTeam" is quite obviously spender with another handle.
i think you're 'quite obviously' wrong ;).
paxteam is basically pipacs and spender is spender. You can read more about pipacs in phrack#66 [0].
> The apparent inability (and perhaps more importantly - total unwilling[n]ess) from the PaX team to be able to see what makes sense in a long-term general kernel and what does not, and split things up and try to push the sensible things up (and know which things are too ugly or too specialized to make sense), caused many PaX features to never be merged.
In a comment [0] the PAX team says
> we never ever considered submitting grsecurity or PaX for mainline inclusion [...] anything similar in the past was user action, not on our behalf
I don't know how Spengler and PAX relate.
[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/313621/