F20 System Wide Change: ARM as primary Architecture

[Peter Robinson]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 07/11/2013 08:46 AM, Till Maas wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 07:48:50AM -0400, Jonathan Masters wrote:
>>>
>>> And following the legitimate concerns about stack-protector this was
>>> raised by ARM into core Linaro as an urgent action for which engineering
>>> resource is being assigned to correct this deficiency ASAP. Thus within a
>>> day an issue has been noted that we were unaware of and is being worked
>>> through a process to correct it, as would be the case with any deficiency on
>>> x86. The stack protection stuff will be fixed. Let's bike shed over the next
>>> nitpick nuance that the anti-ARM crowd want to throw in the way ;)
>>
>>
>> Was the flag ignored previously or why was this missing feature not
>> announced?
>
>
> Please see:
>
> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-July/185106.html
>
> Per Carlos's email, the flag is not ignored, the feature is there, but it
> isn't as fully featured.  Specifically stack guards are present but pointer
> guards are not.  This was news to all of us.  It's disappointing that the
> issue was not brought to the ARM team's attention prior to the F20 promotion
> discussion being introduced.

I think this was a mistake from a number of parties PoV and was
actually discovered when someone was looking at an unrelated aarch64
problem. It was everyone's understanding that it was there, enabled
and good to go. There's other distros that believe that the problem is
solved [1]. I agree this is a needed feature and if we'd been aware of
the problem prior it would have been escalated upstream (ARM, Linaro
etc) long ago.

Peter

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-4.3/+bug/375189