Re: Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support

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From	Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk>
Newsgroups	linux.debian.kernel
Subject	Re: Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support
Date	Wed, 31 Jul 2019 02:00:02 +0200
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X-Original-To	Uwe Kleine-König <u.kleine-koenig@pengutronix.de>, Iain Learmonth <irl@debian.org>
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On Sun, 2019-07-28 at 21:43 +0200, Uwe Kleine-König wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 07:17:23PM +0100, Iain Learmonth wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > On 26/07/2019 19:10, Iain Learmonth wrote:
> > > I am a maintainer for the libax25 and ax25-apps packages, and these
> > > packages are not in great shape. These are userspace packages that
> > > compliment the AX.25 networking support in the Linux kernel. I would
> > > like to propose that we do not ship these packages, or otherwise use the
> > > kernel AX.25 support, in the next Debian release.
> > 
> > Just wanted to draw your attention to this thread on
> > debian-hams@lists.debian.org.
> > 
> > https://lists.debian.org/330b13ec-b5b5-e27b-d694-6053c7421189@debian.org
> > 
> > The next logical step would be to disable it in the kernel if we remove
> > all userspace support.
> 
> my 2 cents: having AX.25 support enabled in the kernel isn't a burden,
> so I'd keep that enabled helping those who then compile libax25 and
> ax25-apps themselves and so get a working setup without the need to
> recompile their kernel.

Iain seems to be saying in
<https://lists.debian.org/debian-hams/2019/07/msg00037.html> that ax25
is now badly broken, and I don't think we should enable badly broken
features.  (However, so far as I know the only reason it's disabled on
arm64 is due to historical accident: it is not enabled in the top-level 
config file but only by per-architecture config files.)

Also, every network protocol that can be auto-loaded adds to the attack
surface of the kernel.  At the very least we should disable auto-
loading of ax25 (and I'm a little surprised I hadn't done that
already).

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings
You can't have everything.  Where would you put it?

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Thread

Re: Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support Uwe Kleine-König <u.kleine-koenig@pengutronix.de> - 2019-07-28 22:00 +0200
  Re: Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> - 2019-07-31 02:00 +0200

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