alpha-sources: obsolete in a 2.6 world?

Jay Maynard <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.linux.gentoo.alpha
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I'm looking at the Alpha source patch tarball that alpha-sources pulls in,
and comparing the functions they provide with the ones in the 2.6.4 kernel
as supplied by gentoo-dev-sources (which will migrate to gentoo-sources
whenever it's sufficiently wrung out). It looks like some, but not quite
all, of it is obsolete:

06_grsecurity: This patch adds the grsecurity configuration selections. This
appears to have been included via the 2.6 security options selection,
although it doens't appear as complete.

0[789]_xfs: These patches add XFS and XFS quota support. This appears to
have been completely included in 2.6.

60_usagi: I'm not sure what this does beyond providing IPv6 support. There
is IPv6 in the 2.6 kernel, with options for tunneling, privacy, IPSec AH and
ESP, and IPComp.

80_patch_int: This patch adds the CryptoAPI. This appears to have been
completely included in 2.6.

81_loop_jari: I think this patch adds cryptographic loopback filesystem
support. There are two kernel configurations that provide this function,
Cryptoloop (which uses CryptoAPI), and Compressloop. I'm not sure what the
difference is.

86_super_freeswan: This one provides enhanced FreeS/WAN IPSec. It's more
complete, apparently, than the IPSec support built into the 2.6 kernel by
default, but I'm not 100% sure about that.

90_sysctl_uac: This one is not present in 2.6. Has the patch been submitted
to the kernel guys at all? It seems too useful to leave out.

There's also 4 patches that aren't part of the tarball, but get applied to
correct various vulnerabilities; I assume those have all been taken care of
in 2.6.4. (They're the do_brk(), mremap(), RTC, and munmap vulnerabilities.)

Finally, there's one fix to a multiline literal in an Alpha-specific
assembler header file, referenced in bug 38354. It appears to have been
fixed in 2.6.4.

I'd like to see the gentoo-sources kernel become the default for Alpha, but
I also don't want to disenfranchise anyone who's using the features the
alpha-sources 2.4.21 kernel has. The sysctl_uac patch can now be applied
only during a build for Alpha, via a feature added to the kernel-2 eclass.
The others aren't Alpha specific, so they can either be included or left out
independdently of the architecture being installed.

Do we have a feel for how many folks out there are using the full
grsecurity, or the complete SuperFreeS/WAN, or USAGI? Is it something we
should push to have included in the Gentoo kernel by default?

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