&gt; And on topic: Why can&#x27;t the grsecurity patches just be merged into the kernel?<p>Because even apart from straight-up bugs like the one being discussed, they are full of design decisions that fail in that direction, <i>by design</i>. Given the option between accidentally allowing malicious code to work and accidentally breaking benign software, Linux upstream prefers the former; grsec prefers the latter. For grsec it is better to have a kernel panic than an information disclosure, if those are your two options; for Linux upstream the preference is backwards.<p>So if grsec is adding a safety option (in this case it was fundamentally caused by a check for integer overflow, IIRC, and getting things to work with that check), they&#x27;re willing to risk breaking code and figuring it out later. LKML is willing to risk having the safety option not apply in all cases, but not risk breaking code that previously worked.<p>Working through the stuff grsec provides and making sure it fits the LKML worldview (i.e., it only fails closed when the risk of false positives is sufficiently low or the admin has an option), both in design <i>and implementation</i>, is slow work. But it is happening.