2.4 Kernel Maintainer Marcelo Tosatti Interviewed

Jeremy Andrews writes "KernelTrap has an interview with Marcelo Tosatti. Marcelo became the maintainer of the 2.4 stable kernel when he was 18 years old, releasing his first kernel, 2.4.16, on November 26'th of 2001. Two years later, he recently released 2.4.23 and plans to soon put the 2.4 stable kernel tree into maintenance mode, only addressing bugs and security issues. Living in Brazil, Marcelo currently works for Cyclades Corporation. In this interview he looks at how he became the 2.4 maintainer, the challenges involved, and brings us up to date with the current status of the 2.4 kernel."

Comments

How is this line not getting mroe attention?

[Anonymous Coward]

JA: During the 2.4.23 release cycle, a bug was fixed in the do_brk() function. This bug was recently exploited in a high profile break-in of four Debian Project Linux servers. Why was 2.4.23 not released sooner when this bug was first fixed?

Marcelo Tosatti: When I first applied the fix (sent from Andrew Morton), I didn't realize it was an exploitable bug (I understood it could crash the box).


This guy just took responsibility for sitting on a known fix, which directly led to Debian compromise.

It also led to a rapid patch cycle all over the place, as opposed to a more stable and controlled cycle, since everyone who saw Andrew Morton's patch could research the vuln and create the exploit.

This delay gave blackhats a lot more time than whitehats.

Perhaps this argues strongly for closed security bug reporting a la OIS' "responsible disclosure" model.

The dreadlocks are new for me

[agoliveira]

I worked with Marcelo at Conectiva (man, I missed that place but...) and that's *not* his real hair :)
He probably just went to a hair stylist and made that... thing :-D
I swear I never imagined Marcelo doing this kind of stuff but he's a kernel developer so you can expect anything!