Asked about a recent Linux kernel vulnerability Ubuntu was slow to fix, Seager admits the miss and points to the jump in patch volume as AI tools find vulnerabilities faster than ever.
for having me. I'm glad to be here.
…du jour right now, let's start with just all of the security stuff going on. There's been a lot of discussion about the recent IPv4 vulnerability in the Linux kernel and all of that. And I know you guys are still, as we record now, working on a fix. How's all that going? What's going on there?
…One of the interesting stories that I heard from our kernel team, we've all just come back from two weeks in Mexico. We had a product roadmap sprint followed by an engineering sprint where we took over 1,100 engineers to a place in Mexico, which is kind of wild. The whole company was only 500 when I joined five years ago. But there was an interesting statistic presented to me, which was that in the last six months, our kernel team have shipped more security patches than in the prior 20 years of Ubuntu. And so that's not an excuse for the vulnerability that we missed and perhaps were less timely than people would have liked. But it is to try and give some confidence that the machine, the machine is being built and the machine is mostly working.
You have taken a lot of steps recently. I mean, just over the past year to sort of advance those timelines.
I think maybe people don't appreciate
that you're already shipping some of those things, even if it may have not applied fully in this case.
