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Re: Do NOT use kernel 2.4.11



On Thu, 11 Oct 2001, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote:

> Looks like there is a huge problem with kernel 2.4.11, specially when
> treating symbolic links. Details will be on the web soon, so please don't
> upgrade your productions machines/servers to 2.4.11

not exactly a huge problem, but possibly a very annoying one. details
attached at the bottom of this message.

on a side note, imho, anyone using latest 2.4.xx kernels for production
machines is either brave or a lunatic. linus kernels are getting better
(recent snafu not included) and ac kernels are getting godd reviews, but
i wouldn't call any of them stable. how can you call something which was
tested for only a few days stable? for stable kernels, i would
recommend to go with distribution kernels.

mulix, who compiled 2.4.11 last night but didnt boot into it, and now
never will.

linus' message re 2.4.11:

>From torvalds@transmeta.com Thu Oct 11 12:10:11 2001
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 01:04:49 -0700 (PDT)
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
To: Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Uhhuh.. 2.4.12


2.4.11 had a fix for a symlink DoS attack, but sadly that fix broke the
creation of files through a dangling symlink rather badly (it caused the
inode to be created in the very same inode as the symlink, with unhappy
end results).

Happily nobody uses that particular horror - or _almost_ nobody does. It
looks like at least the SuSE installer (yast2) does, which causes a nasty
unkillable inode as /dev/mouse if you use yast2 on 2.4.11.

("debugfs -w rootdev" + "rm /dev/mouse" will remove it, although I suspect
there are other less drastic methods too if your fsck doesn't seem to
notice anything wrong with it. Only one report of this actually happening
so far).

So I made a 2.4.12, and renamed away the sorry excuse for a kernel that
2.4.11 was.

		Linus

-----
final:
 - Greg KH: USB update (fix UHCI timeouts, serial unplug)
 - Christoph Rohland: shmem locking fixes
 - Al Viro: more mount cleanup
 - me: fix bad interaction with link_count handling
 - David Miller: Sparc updates, net cleanup
 - Tim Waugh: parport update
 - Jeff Garzik: net driver updates

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