Re: [GIT PULL] gcc-plugin updates for v4.19-rc1

[Kees Cook]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I absolutely refuse to take any hardening patches at all that have
> BUG() or panic() or similar machine-killing in it.

Okay, mental model adjusted. :) It was only "strong discouraged" until now.

> I thought VLA's were mostly gone.

Yes. Out of the ~115 instances we counted when we started with v4.16,
we've chipped away at them pretty steadily. Right now there are two
"one-off"s that haven't been picked up by maintainers:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kees/linux.git/log/?h=vla/leftovers

and the remaining series against crypto, for which I am waiting on
further review for Herbert. All the really odd-ball crypto cases have
been handled (and are up for the merge window for v4.19), but there's
still some minor changes that Herbert is examining:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kees/linux.git/log/?h=vla/crypto

And after that, there's a single patch to move -Wvla up into the
top-level Makefile:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10489873/

So, we're basically done, but the timing with the merge window wasn't
great since crypto continues to get tweaked and has taken much longer
than I had expected.

-Kees

-- 
Kees Cook
Pixel Security