Are grsecurity kernels available through Arch and Gentoo repos suitable for production?

Question

From grsecurity announce (August 26, 2015):

The test series, unfit in our view for production use, will however continue to be available to the public to avoid impact to the Gentoo Hardened and Arch Linux communities

Does versions available through Arch and Gentoo repos recommended to use? What are possible drawbacks?

isn't this a question for them? They have a support channel: https://grsecurity.net/support.php — schroeder, Jan 07 '17 at 08:04
i thought by them you mean "arch and gentoo communities". thanks for the link. this makes sence. — olmstad, Jan 07 '17 at 08:26

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '21 at 02:13

I think grsecurity is fairly clear as to whether they think they are suitable for production in the paragraph you quoted: they're not.

They are well tested and potentially patched by the Arch and Gentoo communities that use them and mark them stable but if you mean to advertise that you are using grsecurity to clients, you'll have a hard time saying that you're using versions grsecurity themselves deem unsuitable for production.

That was actually the whole point of restricting access to the stable versions of grsecurity after Intel continuously used their name without consent, even for unsupported kernel versions.

Overall, you're generally safe using them in a production environment, you just can't brag about it since officially, grsecurity doesn't consider the patches you're using.

Are grsecurity kernels available through Arch and Gentoo repos suitable for production?

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