Re: Linux 4.9.256

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On 2/8/21 8:57 PM, Sasha Levin wrote:
On Mon, Feb 08, 2021 at 05:50:21PM +0200, Avi Kivity wrote:
On 05/02/2021 16.26, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.256 kernel.

This, and the 4.4.256 release are a little bit "different" than normal.

This contains only 1 patch, just the version bump from .255 to .256 which ends up causing the userspace-visable LINUX_VERSION_CODE to behave a bit differently
than normal due to the "overflow".

With this release, KERNEL_VERSION(4, 9, 256) is the same as KERNEL_VERSION(4, 10, 0).


I think this is a bad idea. Many kernel features can only be discovered by checking the kernel version. If a feature was introduced in 4.10, then an application can be tricked into thinking a 4.9 kernel has it.


IMO, better to stop LINUX_VERSION_CODE at 255 and introduce a

In the upstream (and new -stable fix) we did this part.

LINUX_VERSION_CODE_IMPROVED that has more bits for patchlevel.

Do you have a usecase where it's actually needed? i.e. userspace that
checks for -stable patchlevels?


Not stable patchlevels, but minors. So a change from 4.9 to 4.10 could be harmful.


I have two such examples (not on the 4.9->4.10 boundary), but they test the runtime version from uname(), not LINUX_VERSION_CODE, so they would be vulnerable to such a change.





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