by debrouxl » Sun May 11, 2014 6:06 am
I think that there's a middle ground between the current situation (PaX + grsecurity being an out of tree patch of nearly 4 MB, sadly used by only a small minority of users, despite its crystal clear usefulness) and full integration of PaX + grsecurity into mainline Linux.
With enough time, programming knowledge, motivation, it is possible to move hunks of PaX / grsecurity into mainline Linux (even if mainline isn't necessarily receptive). Once in a while, someone upstreams several hunks: for instance, in April, minipli moved three hunks of PaX (constifying ipc_ops structures used for msgget/semget/shmget) to mainline (for now, linux-next).
This is not meant as a criticism of the way spender / "PaX Team" / ephox work. It's understandable they want to focus on improving the features of PaX / grsecurity, rather than spend time trying to deal with mainline's security standards and integration process. I feel that we'd all be better of if more of us (yup, I'm including myself in the pack) spent time upstreaming some PaX / grsecurity bits, so that more people can benefit from them.