grsecurity forums

I tried to upgrade a Debian Lenny system to Squeeze.

I ran into the error:
grsec: denied access of range 0 -> a00 in /dev/mem by /sbin/lilo[..]..

I can see the benefits of not allowing anyone to replace a kernel, but how am I supposed to upgrade a system?
(After that i ran into troubles with udev, but I hope that is unrelated.)

I didn't know of anything using the first page in /dev/mem so I disallowed it. I've verified with the lilo source that it does need this access to the BIOS data area, of size 5*SECTOR_SIZE (5 * 512 = 0xa00), so I'll add an exception for this case. The relevant functions are fetch() and purge() in probe.c.

Thanks,
-Brad

This is fixed in the latest patches released. Thanks again for the report.

-Brad

The original problem (not being able to install a new kernel) was not related to grsecurity. It was an udev-poblem which has been solved.

The other problem with the grsec error was also present in other versions of debian. This error was solved after installing the latest patch.
Thank you.