Red Hat reports security issue in Linux Kernel which was fixed 17 months prior

Re:Red Hat reports security issue in Linux Kernel which was ... by brozaman on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @02:52PM (#23618477)

If it's any consolation, I'm a software engineer working for Red Hat on the userspace part of one of our most bleeding edge products, and it's a pain for us too :). And it's a much bigger pain for our kernel guys

It would be way cheaper and easier for us to ship a newer kernel, we do it because it allows RHEL to have significantly less regressions than upstream kernels (and I'm talking about what the kernel engineers say, not some marketing bullshit).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Red Hat reports security issue in Linux Kernel which was ... by bonzini on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @03:22PM (#23618917)

Yes (kernel engineer here), we can mix and match what we pick and when. Almost every major subsystem is updated only a few months after the corresponding patches hit Linus's tree.

I would guess that most of RHEL 7 is on par with 4.14 or 4.19 (which is newer than the RHEL 8 kernel!) and RHEL8.3 will have subsystems updated up to 5.7-5.8.

Of course it's not much fun backporting 50 patches for Intel vulnerability mitigations to RHEL7.2 that some mission critical apps still use. But I guess it pays my bills so who am I to complain, I love everything else about my job. ;)

[ Parent | on HN ]