TSYNC Not a Hard Requirement For Google Chrome After All

An anonymous reader writes A few days ago it appeared that Google began requiring new versions of the Linux kernel for the Chrome/Chromium web browser. To some people, such requirement smelled funny, and it turns out that those people had the right hunch. Google does not intend for there to be a hard requirement on the latest versions of the Linux kernel that expose SECCOMP_FILTER_FLAG_TSYNC, but instead many users are hitting an issue around it. A Chromium developer commented on the related bug: "Updating the title so that people who have been mislead into thinking non-TSYNC kernels were deprecated immediately understand that there is simply 'some unknown bug' hitting some users." Of course, a user having the TSYNC feature in his kernel will still get a security benefit.

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For those who don't know what this TSYNC thing is

[bigHairyDog]

The linux seccomp feature provides application sandboxing. Chrome uses it to sandbox tabs from each other and native plugins from the rest of the system.

Seccomp is accessed through the seccomp (2) system call. The SECCOMP_FILTER_FLAG_TSYNC flag is an option to seccomp (2) that transparently synchronises the effect of the call across all sandboxed threads.