We're back with another report on the Gentoo Hardened project. Please excuse my brevity, as you've noticed I'm not that active (yet) due to work on an external project - I'll be back mid-July though. I promise.

On the Toolchain side, GCC 4.8.1 is in the tree and has the GCC plugin header fix. Also, for IA64 and ARM, the necessary PIE patches are available as well to make this work on those architectures too.

For uclibc, blueness is continuing the necessary support for everything so far. He has also added mips64 n32 uclibc because new router boards use this.

In his time, blueness is also playing with a uclibc-powered desktop and another C library called musl.

On the Kernel, grSecurity and PaX side, we are having troubles with the 3.8+ kernels and UEFI machines when the machines have ltitle memory available (for instance when it is limited with mem=).

The PaX extended attribute support is still on-going, mainly because we need to have support for the user.pax attributes in common tools like install, which is heavily used in Gentoo's ebuilds. The merge phase, where the data is moved from the image location to the root, has been supporting xattr moves for a while thanks to zmedico and arfrever, but other installation phases still needed to be fixed or worked around. We tried with a common patch on this, but there was little interest in this approach, so we settled with a wrapper around install inside of Portage. This will be soon released and we again have full end-to-end xattr pax flag support.

On the SELinux support, the latest userland and policy releases have been stabilized in the Gentoo tree.

On the Profiles, blueness added a musl subprofile for testing of the musl C library.