The Gentoo administrators said this decision had been taken because the Grsecurity developers had decided to limit access to the hardening patches.

As a result, the distribution will not have a hardened kernel source available from the end of September, with the hardened sources being masked from 27 August onwards.

Gentoo is a distribution meant for advanced Linux users. It offers both ordinary kernel sources and hardened sources.

On 26 April, Grsecurity said it was removing public test patches from the download area. 

Anyone who wanted to continue using the hardening patches were told: "We recommend you become a Grsecurity commercial subscriber. Subscribers may opt-in to gain access to our -beta patches which track the latest kernel releases."

Following comments by well-known open source advocate Bruce Perens that this move violated the GNU General Public Licence 2 under which the kernel is distributed, Grsecurity sued Perens.

Perens had characterised the move as presenting "a contributory infringement and breach of contract risk".

The Gentoo admins said userspace hardening and support for SELinux would remain in the Gentoo package tree.