Hacker News Reader

Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone seen talk of this leading to an expedited 3.13.2/3.12.10 release? If I need to manually patch my kernels to fix this, I'll do it, but if upstream is going to release fixed versions shortly, that seems like the preferable solution.

So far though, I haven't seen anything about merging in the patch provided by PaX.

View on HN

Are you actually using x32? I doubt most people are. It didn't even exist in a stable kernel until April 2012.

I am not actively using it, but I am running kernels that have CONFIG_X86_X32 enabled.

Yeah, I just saw that Ubuntu at least already enabled it quite a while ago. Ouch.

I don't suppose there's some way to disable x32 from within a running system that's not using it?

edit: It doesn't appear there is. Not shocking, but I was hoping for a bit of luck.

As far as I know, no. I'm about 90% sure you have to rebuild the kernel to disable it. That said, I've only read about it, not played with it, and I don't have a box with it enabled at my fingertips.

That said, this is a local exploit, so unless you have untrusted users or otherwise run untrusted native code, your risk is pretty low. Someone would have to exploit something else first to get access to run custom code on the box.

There's always Ksplice, though it's only really available for Oracle (they also distribute free Ubuntu Desktop and Fedora patches to entice you, but I would be willing to bet you're more interested in server).

There is already a patch out for Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1274349

Reply on news.ycombinator.com