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My ubuntu server 12.04.4 LTS is running kernel 3.5.0-54.81~precise1. I need to patch the kernel to avoid the Dirty Cow vulnerability. By researching the forums I found that the release that fixes the bug in 12.04 is 3.2.0-113.155

Obviously 3.2.0-113.155 was released long after 3.5.0-54.81~precise1, however, because of being a lower version, the OS boots to the 3.5 kernel.

My question is if 3.5.0-54.81~precise1 is affected by the bug and I need to change it to 3.2.0-113.155 or there is a 3.5 release that fixes the bug.

Kind regards, Pavlos Polianidis

2 Answers 2

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Your current kernel version 3.5.0-54.81 was released in July 2014. For over 2 years you have not been receiving bug fixes or security patches.

Kernel 3.2 might seem like an earlier version but in reality it is a long term kernel version fully supported until May 2018. See this link for long term kernel releases: (www.kernel.org releases).

When your 3.5 Kernel reached end of life back in July 2014 you could have switched to 3.2 Kernel LTS back then and in any respect you should do it now.

Of course always keep your previous version on grub's advanced menu option in case you need to reboot with it.

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There is currently no Ubuntu-supported 3.5 kernel. The supported kernel versions for Precise are 3.2 and 3.13, so you must choose one of them.

In any case, you should uninstall all your 3.5 kernels, since they are unsupported. You can do dpkg -l | grep linux to see a list of your kernel-related packages; uninstall everything that has 3.5 in its version number.

If you want to install 3.13, see here (basically, you will want to install linux-generic-lts-trusty).

If you want to install 3.2 and it is not installed already, install linux-generic.

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