2026-08-14 03:06:28
Christopher Domas has published a proof of concept with a description showing how to use AMD memory controllers' bank swizzle mode to bypass memory protection and read or write arbitrary data, including CPU microcode definitions and memory belonging to the platform security processor. Among other things, this allows code running at the kernel level to directly manipulate the meaning of processor instructions, potentially bypassing other security measures such as memory encryption and virtual machine isolation.
This is not, strictly, unexpected behavior: it is documented in AMD's manual (on page 113 of that PDF). But the fact that it can be used to access arbitrary memory and thereby rewrite supposedly immutable parts of the computer's firmware without crashing the host machine seems like an unintentional side-effect of the design. Fortunately, since enabling bank swizzle mode requires kernel-level privileges, the vulnerability is not an immediate problem for most software. Still, it seems likely that this technique will end up being used for nefarious purposes eventually.
2026-08-13 21:47:49
Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes:
This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -- plus several robustness hardenings. CVE IDs were assigned by VulnCheck (CNA); the precise "introduced in" version ranges accompany each advisory, and many are much narrower than "everything before 3.5.0". Every fix ships with a regression test in the test suite that fails on the unfixed tree.
2026-08-13 21:46:28
The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The expansion to 64 bits on most popular architectures would seem to have removed those limits now; some Arm systems, for example, can use 56 of those bits to access up to 72PB of memory. So it might be surprising that the Arm architecture is evolving to support even larger page-table entries (PTEs). This patch set from Anshuman Khandual adds support for 128-bit PTEs, but who will benefit from this capability is not entirely clear.
2026-08-13 21:12:41
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (abrt, dhcpcd, edk2, freerdp, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, keylime, libarchive, libyang, nodejs-nodemon, opencryptoki, osbuild-composer, pacemaker, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql18, python-idna, python3.9, udisks2, valkey, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (flatpak, lemonldap-ng, neutron, python-django, spip, xdg-dbus-proxy, and xorg-server), Fedora (apr-util, cri-o1.34, libcupsfilters, linux-firmware, sqlite, and vaultwarden), Gentoo (FreeType), Oracle (dovecot, evince, fence-agents, gnutls, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, isns-utils, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, libarchive, osbuild-composer, pipewire, postgresql, ruby, ruby:3.3, sudo, and udisks2), Red Hat (bind, bind9.16, gnome-remote-desktop, grafana, opentelemetry-collector, python-pillow, python3, python3.12, python3.14, python3.9, and rhc), SUSE (chromium, clusterctl, dracut, gd, git-cliff, gleam, govulncheck-vulndb, graphicsmagick, gzip, kernel, kubevirt, libheif, librest0_7, nodejs22, nodejs24, openssh, openvpn, python3, python313-scikit-learn, rpm, stunnel, and zk), and Ubuntu (kernel, libgit2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-6.8, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-xilinx, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fips, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-realtime, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-kvm, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-fde, linux-ibm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.17, linux-gcp-6.17, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-oem-6.17, linux-realtime-6.17, node-follow-redirects, and yelp).
2026-08-13 08:23:17
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
2026-08-13 02:34:01
Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer I/O errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail, pick the status code to return, or target a disk directly without employing a stacked device on top. Use of a stacked device means the test runs against the mapper device, not the disk it was meant to exercise. A patch series from Christoph Hellwig adds a configurable error-injection interface that does all three things that the current error-injection code lacks, controlled by a per-disk debugfs file.