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WP Wes Payne Wes Payne Co-host of LINUX Unplugged, the Jupiter Broadcasting show on Linux, open source, self-hosting and home lab tooling, with topics ranging from NixOS and Home Assi...

“Ptrace is being restricted by default. This doesn't break strace, but if you're trying to trace an already running process, then you're going to need to change a system setting. What they're doing, which is kind of clever, is they ship scope zero, where a process can only do it to its own threads. But if you install a debugging tool that might need this functionality legitimately, it ships a linked package which sets that system setting back to one. So hopefully you won't notice it.”

LINUX Unplugged · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“Ptrace is being restricted by default. This doesn't break strace, but if you're trying to trace an already running process, then you're going to need to change a system setting. What they're doing, which is kind of clever, is they ship scope zero, where a process can only do it to its own threads. But if you install a debugging tool that might need this functionality legitimately, it ships a linked package which sets that system setting back to one. So hopefully you won't notice it.” — Wes Payne, LINUX Unplugged

Context

Walking through Fedora 45's under-the-hood hardening, Wes explains a change that affects anyone attaching a debugger or tracer to a process that's already running, and the trick Fedora uses to keep it from getting in developers' way.

Transcript

LINUX Unplugged Around 03:58 into the episode
Wes Payne

And it's a lot of work to make sure you're doing it right and getting it passed. And you don't want your shiny new release to have a bunch of problems baked in.

Chris Fisher

…There's definitely nice stuff. But I think what really has us excited about Fedora 45 is the things under the hood. And it starts with just better security practices in some areas, replacing some classic tools that we've all relied on for over a decade and RPM signature enforcement now by default.

Wes Payne

Yeah, unsigned packages are going to fail unless you actually have dash dash note signature there. There's various other escape patches. There's also things coming in DNF5, per repo GPG check equals zero. If you're just using already signed repos, you're probably not going to notice. But if you're using unsigned stuff, it's going to get, you're going to have to do a little more actively to tell the system that's okay and not a security problem. A few other things like Ptrace is being restricted by default. This doesn't break S-Trace, but if you're trying to trace an already running process, then you're going to need to change a system setting. Or what they're doing, which is kind of clever, is like they start it to this scope zero, which is you can only do it to your own processes and threads. Like a process can do it to its own threads, but it can't do it to a separate process. The scope one means you can. And so they're going to ship scope zero, but then if you install anything like a debugging tool, something that might need this functionality legitimately, then it ships a linked package, which then sets that system setting back to one. So hopefully you won't notice it. You might in some esoteric use cases. That's the thing to check for.

Chris Fisher

I think the one that has my attention, and I hinted at this, they're replacing a tool that I think maybe if Ubuntu had done this, it would have been kind of headline news. They have replaced GNOME Keyring with 007, which is Rust-based.

Wes Payne

Is that a better or a worse name? I don't know, but it is more fun.

Chris Fisher

It is a lot more fun. It's a Rustaemon with a PAM unlock at login, plus a XDG portal for like flat packs, and they'll automatically migrate your existing keyring.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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