Nvidia is reported to have a dangerous
exploit in its binary driver and it seems that is doing nothing to fix
the situation or even acknowledge it.
In a mailing list post,
Dave Airlie, a well known X hacker, has reported that a bug in the
Nvidia binary would grant a user root access. He says the information
has been passed to him anonymously, but the source is to be trusted.
“It
basically abuses the fact that the /dev/nvidia0 device accept changes
to the VGA window and moves the window around until it can read/write to
somewhere useful in physical RAM, then it just does an priv escalation
by writing directly to kernel memory.” - said Dave Airlie.
Nvidia
has some problems with its drivers before, and even recently, Linus
Thorvalds gave them the finger, literally. This is not good news for the
video card manufacturer. The only way out of this is to provide a fix
as quickly as possible.
Now that we know the codename for the upcoming Fedora 18 operating system, and the fact that it will introduce support for 256-color terminals, it is time to learn something about other features that will be incorporated in this anticipated release.
On
the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting that took
place two days ago, on July 30th, the developers approved several new
features for the Fedora 18 release:
· Samba 4.0;
· MATE desktop environment;
· oVirt engine 3.1;
· Agent-Free Systems Management;
· Sugar 0.98;
· LTTng 2.0;
· ownCloud;
· support for Google Cloud Printing;
· support for HP ePrint;
· support for network IPP servers;
· SELinux Systemd Access Control;
· IPA v3 trusts update;
· Python 3.3;
· FedFS (Federated File System);
· Server KMS drivers;
· LLVM support on 64-bit POWER systems;
· Systemtap 2.0;
· NFSometer;
· VNCServer support for LLVMpipe/Mesa on 64-bit IBM Power Systems;
· QXL/Spice KMS driver.
