The CVE-2022-4139 vulnerability discovered earlier this week is a security flaw surrounding GPU TLB flushing. In some cases (Gen12 hardware with a specific type of engine), the TLB of the engine is not flushed. a local attacker could use the vulnerability to elevate privileges on the device in question to execute arbitrary code.

The seclists page indicates that the vulnerability runs behind an active IOMMU depending on whether the GPU has two possible scenarios that could occur.

1. there is no IOMMU – the GPU can still access physical memory, which may have been allocated by the OS to a different process.
2. There is an IOMMU – the GPU can access any memory if the malicious process is able to create/reuse the necessary IOMMU mappings.

An incorrect TLB flush issue was discovered in the GPU i915 kernel driver for the Linux kernel that could lead to random memory corruption or data leakage,” Red Hat said in a Nov. 30, 2022, advisory. This vulnerability could allow local users to crash the system or elevate their privileges on the system.”

All Intel Collective and Solo Gen12 are affected, including Tiger Lake, Rocket Lake, Alder Lake, DG1, Raptor Lake, DG2, Arctic Sound, and Meteor Lake.

In today’s release of Linux 6.0.11, Linux 5.15.81 and Linux 5.10.157 the changelog states: “DRM / i915: fix TLB failure for Gen12 video and compute engines”.

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(Picture from: Loongson official website)

A few days ago, the developers have nailed the LoongArch EFI boot, ready for EFI confidential computing for Linux 6.1. The main work on Wednesday is mainly related to the porting update merger of LongArch CPU.

In addition, this development cycle has also undergone a refactoring of TLB / cache operations, supporting qspinlock / perf events, Kexec and Kdump processing.

Generic BUG() handler for architecture-oriented implementation, eBPF JIT support, ACPI-based laptop driver, and deconfig default kernel configuration.

To sum up, this round of Linux 6.1 merge is still a fairly busy feature cycle for LoongArch.

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Rust is a modern general-purpose programming language designed by Graydon Hoare while working at Mozilla, the first company to officially sponsor and adopt the language in its experimental browser engine, Servo.

Like many other compiled languages, Rust can provide native performance while offering compatibility for different types of applications, from traditional computing to low-resource devices and embedded devices. In addition to performance, Rust has been designed from the outset to provide memory safety protection, eliminating many class errors and potential vulnerabilities at compile time.

The first version of Rust was released 12 years ago, and discussions to incorporate the language into the Linux kernel have been ongoing for a long time. Google is a founding member of the Rust Foundation, along with AWS, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla, and is actively using Rust to develop Android, a mobile operating system built on a modified version of Linux The company is a founding member of the Rust Foundation along with AWS, Huawei, Microsoft and Mozilla.

In 2021, team member Almeida Filho wrote that Rust was “poised to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel”.Filho said that the new language could help reduce potential bugs and security vulnerabilities in privileged code while working well with the core kernel. It also works well with the kernel and retains its performance characteristics.

Among top Linux contributors, there are concerns that Rust requires non-standard extensions to work with the kernel, but according to Torvalds, programmers have been using exceptions to the standard C language for “decades”.

Torvalds added that there are still some problems with the compiler, but as Rust is well supported on the Clang front-end, merging programming languages may help the kernel rather than hurt it. Nevertheless, the kernel merger should mark an important first step in the future of Linux+Rust.

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