Linux OS support speeds up for AMD's Hammer
Posted by Toxicfume on 31 March 2002 - 17:00 · 11 comments & 76 views
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The labs said that 2.4.19pre4 based X86-64 linux kernel snapshot has now been released and describes it as a major update for the kernel.
The announcement said that it has so many bug fixes from the previous kernel that it is recommended that every X86-64 user (Intel too?) should upgrade to it.
What's most interesting is that the 2.4 kernel is the stable tree, while the 2.5 kernel is the experimental programmers' tree, but both both will be synchronised soon.
There's already Linux support for sound, IDE and USB 2.0 devices in the 8111 chipset, and the target architecture is Clawhammer rather than Sledgehammer.
The multiprocessing follows the SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) model and there's no mention of Numa – which AMD seems to be against for political decisions.
Reports of the hole began circulating in mid-March by way of security discussion groups and other Internet resources. But the flaw gained new attention Thursday when security services company Entercept Security Technologies issued a bulletin warning customers of the hole.
Entercept security expert Chad Harrington said the hole poses a moderate risk, because the attacker would have to exploit it in person rather than over the Internet. He said Entercept contacted Microsoft about the flaw more than two weeks ago but decided to go public with the problem now because news of the risk was spreading while Microsoft was still preparing a response.
"We were simply trying to educate people about something people in the hacking community already know about," Harrington said. "Generally we don't feel security researchers should publicize vulnerabilities until the software vendor has a fix...but this was a special case. The poison was already out there."
Microsoft said in a statement that it is still researching the vulnerability, and appeared to criticize Entercept for raising the alarm. "We are concerned that this report has gone public before we've had a fair chance to investigate it," the statement read. "Its publication may cause our customers needless confusion and apprehension or possibly even put them at risk. Responsible security researchers work with the vendor of a suspected vulnerability issue to ensure that countermeasures are developed before the issue is made public and customers are needlessly put at risk."
Microsoft is working with security researchers to develop guidelines about how and when software vulnerabilities should be reported. The issue has become part of the company's "Trustworthy Computing" campaign to make security a priority in its products.
Harrington said a temporary fix for the vulnerability was available from the German branch of the Computer Emergency Response Team.