Kernel: LWN Coverage (No Longer Paywalled) and Initial HDMI 2.0 Support With Nouveau Slated For The Next Linux Kernel
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Revenge of the modems
Back in the halcyon days of the previous century, those with a technical inclination often became overly acquainted with modems—not just the strange sounds they made when connecting, but the AT commands that were used to control them. While the AT command set is still in use (notably for GSM networks), it is generally hidden these days. But some security researchers have found that Android phones often make AT commands available via their USB ports, which is something that can potentially be exploited by rogue USB devices of various sorts.
A paper [PDF] that was written by a long list of researchers (Dave (Jing) Tian, Grant Hernandez, Joseph I. Choi, Vanessa Frost, Christie Ruales, Patrick Traynor, Hayawardh Vijayakumar, Lee Harrison, Amir Rahmati, Michael Grace, and Kevin R. B. Butler) and presented at the 27th USENIX Security Symposium described the findings. A rather large number of Android firmware builds were scanned for the presence of AT commands and many were found to have them. That's not entirely surprising since the baseband processors used to communicate with the mobile network often use AT commands for configuration. But it turns out that Android vendors have also added their own custom AT commands that can have a variety of potentially harmful effects—making those available over USB is even more problematic.
They started by searching through 2018 separate Android binary images (it is not clear how that number came about, perhaps it is simply coincidental) from 11 different vendors. They extracted and decompressed the various pieces inside the images and then searched those files for AT command strings. That process led to a database of 3500 AT commands, which can be seen at the web site for ATtention Spanned—the name given to the vulnerabilities.
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XFS, LSM, and low-level management APIs
The Linux Security Module (LSM) subsystem allows security modules to hook into many low-level operations within the kernel; modules can use those hooks to examine each requested operation and decide whether it should be allowed to proceed or not. In theory, just about every low-level operation is covered by an LSM hook; in practice, there are some gaps. A discussion regarding one of those gaps — low-level ioctl() operations on XFS filesystems — has revealed a thorny problem and a significant difference of opinion on what the correct solution is.
In late September Tong Zhang pointed out that xfs_file_ioctl(), the 300-line function that dispatches the various ioctl() operations that can be performed on an XFS filesystem, was making a call to vfs_readlink() without first consulting the security_inode_readlink() LSM hook. As a result, a user with the privilege to invoke that operation (CAP_SYS_ADMIN) could read the value of a symbolic link within the filesystem, even if the security policy in place would otherwise forbid it. Zhang suggested that a call to the LSM hook should be added to address this problem.
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Initial HDMI 2.0 Support With Nouveau Slated For The Next Linux Kernel
Days after Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs began staging changes for this open-source NVIDIA driver ahead of the next kernel cycle, this evening Ben Skeggs submitted the DRM-Next pull request to queue this work for the Linux 4.20/5.0 kernel cycle.
As covered in that previous article, there isn't a whole lot on the Nouveau kernel driver front at this time. Skeggs summed up these open-source NVIDIA driver changes as: "Just initial HDMI 2.0 support, and a bunch of other cleanups."
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Device-to-device memory-transfer offload with P2PDMA
One of the most common tasks carried out by device drivers is setting up DMA operations for data transfers between main memory and the device. Often, data read into memory from one device will be immediately written, unchanged, to another device. Common examples include carrying the image between the camera and screen on a mobile phone, or downloading files to be saved on a disk. Those transfers have an impact on the CPU even if it does not use the data directly, due to higher memory use and effects like cache trashing. There are cases where it is possible to avoid usage of the system memory completely, though. A patch set (posted by Logan Gunthorpe with contributions by Christoph Hellwig and Steve Wise) has been in the works for some time that addresses this case for PCI devices using peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers, with a focus on offering an offload option for the NVMe fabrics target subsystem.
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