Comment on An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience
save_the_humans@leminal.space 1 month agoHey man, let us have this one. Any immutable/atomic distribution could have either prevented this or easily rolled back the update. Not to mention a Linux offering by something like Red Hat, for example, wouldnt recommend installing closed source third party kernel modules for exactly this reason. Not sure about the feasibility of these endpoints, but they way things are generally done on, and the philosophy of, Linux could very well have avoided this catastrophe.
stephen01king@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Can you explain what is immutable/atomic distribution and how it can prevent this?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
An immutable distribution is one that treats the system files as read-only. Applications are handled separately, and updates to the system are done in an image-based way, rather than changing a few updated files, basically the OS gets replaced with an updated version. It prevents users or malicious outsiders from just changing system files. Fedora Silverblue and SteamOS as found on Valve’s Steam Deck are examples of immutable distros.
Now, with soemthing like Crowdstrike that operates in kernel space…I’m too far outside my wheelhouse to grasp how that would work on an immutable system. How it would be implemented.
save_the_humans@leminal.space 1 month ago
My thought was mostly that this kind of invasive third party and closed source kernel module security wouldn’t have been necessary. But I’m pretty sure rollbacks can include kernel changes in a previous image.