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by tredre3 699 days ago
> Would it happen on Linux?

It absolutely would. Windows is way ahead in terms of driver isolation and stability. Most drivers cannot bring down the system (your GPU driver can crash, your screen will flicker and maybe apps that were using it will crash, but the system recovers). Not so on Linux unfortunately, any driver will bring the system down.

More recently certain class of drivers have been making use of ebpf or virt2, which helps in isolating the driver. But I know for a fact that CS on Linux is as low level as it can be.

So long story short only MacOS is resistant to this, because they've simply deprecated any third party kernel extensions/modules.
4 comments
orbital-decay 699 days ago
> your GPU driver can crash, your screen will flicker and maybe apps that were using it will crash, but the system recovers

Only if the userspace part of the driver has crashed. It's not really relevant to what happened here (it was kernel code).

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ndr_ 698 days ago
Yes, Crowdstrike specifically disabled Linux systems in the past: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41005936
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bean-weevil 698 days ago
On my work machine, crowdstrike is using ebpf. Not loading any kernel modules.
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commercialnix 698 days ago
> Not so on Linux unfortunately, any driver will bring the system down.

I work for a company that provides secure endpoints that are Linux based (and can also run Windows apps without issue). We do not ship Linux kernels that contain drivers that cause crashes.

Per our IT patterns and also mandated by our commercial contracts, we investigate any crashes that occur. Over the last five years, not a single crash has been caused by a device driver.

We also will never have a use for the style of security software that Crowdstrike has. Our security stack is proactively preventative, not reactive or looking for "anomalies".

So this "it absolutely would [happen on Linux]", should have an asterisk, a huge one glaring like the sun, and without said asterisk is inaccurate at an extreme.

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jiehong 698 days ago
It is a fact that Linux driver crashes causes a kernel crash, and it’s not that rare (like usb drivers). Even GPU drivers cause this [0].

But good job on not having a crash from a driver so far. Raspberry Pi users weren’t that lucky for example.

[0]: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/bug-report-455-23-04-k...

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commercialnix 698 days ago
The Linux kernel images my company ships do not use the shit driver you are citing. We intentionally do not deploy hardware with these chips for this reason.

Yes there are tons of Linux images out there built by stupid people and thus crash all the time, which is not Linux' fault but the fault of those stupid people. As already should have been clear enough, or so I thought in the comment you replied t: my company doesn't ship stupid images built by stupid people.

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commercialnix 698 days ago
> It is a fact that Linux driver crashes causes a kernel crash

See what was already written in the comment you replied to:

  We do not ship Linux kernels that contain drivers that cause crashes.
We do not ship drivers that crash, hence they do not cause a crash.
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