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The openSUSE project has announcedthe release of openSUSE Leap 15.1. "Leap releases are scalable and both the desktop and server are equally important for professional’s workloads, which is reflected in the installation menu as well as the amount of packages Leap offers and hardware it supports. Leap is well suited and prepared for usage as a Virtual Machine (VM) or container guest, allowing professional users to efficiently run network services no matter whether it’s a single server or a data center."

Stable kernels 5.1.4, 5.0.18, 4.19.45, 4.14.121, and 4.9.178 have been released. They all containimportant fixes and users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (ruby and wget), Debian (proftpd-dfsg), Fedora (firefox, mupdf, nss, and wavpack), openSUSE (evolution, GraphicsMagick, graphviz, libxslt, openssl-1_0_0, ovmf, and sqlite3), Red Hat (dotnet, python27-python and python27-python-jinja2, and rh-mariadb102-mariadb and rh-mariadb102-galera), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (gnutls, java-1_7_1-ibm, and java-1_8_0-ibm), and Ubuntu (curl, firefox, php5, and webkit2gtk).

Version8.5 of the Tor Browser is out. "Tor Browser 8.5 is the firststable release for Android. Since we released the first alpha version inSeptember, we've been hard at work making sure we can provide theprotections users are already enjoying on desktop to the Androidplatform. Mobile browsing is increasing around the world, and in someparts, it is commonly the only way people access the internet. In thesesame areas, there is often heavy surveillance and censorship online, so wemade it a priority to reach these users."

The cost of fsync()is well known to filesystem developers, which is why there are efforts to providecheaper alternatives. Ric Wheeler wanted to discuss the longstanding idea ofadding an asynchronous version of fsync() in a filesystem sessionat the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit(LSFMM). It turns out that what he wants may already be available via the new io_uring interface.

The Mozilla blog takesa look at the Firefox 67 release. "Today’s new Firefox releasecontinues to bring fast and private together right at the crossroads ofperformance and security. It includes improvements that continue to keepFirefox fast while giving you more control and assurance through newfeatures that your personal information is safe while you’re online withus." See the releasenotes for more information.

The "guarantees" that existing filesystems make with regard to persistencein the face of a system crash was the subject of a session led by AmirGoldstein at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-ManagementSummit (LSFMM). The problem is that filesystem developers are not willingto make much in the way of guarantees unless applications call fsync()—somethingthat is not popular with application developers, who want a cheaper option.

The kernel mailing lists carry the sad newsthat longtime kernel contributor and subsystem maintainer MartinSchwidefsky has been killed in an accident. "Martin was the most significant contributor to the initial s390 portof the Linux Kernel and later the maintainer of the s390 architecturebackend. His technical expertise as well as his mentoring skills wereoutstanding. Martin was well known for his positive mindset and hiswillingness to help.He will be greatly missed."

The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community is currently underdiscussion as the community considers different options for how it wantsto be organized and governed in the future. Among the options underconsideration is the possibility of openSUSE setting up an entirely independent foundation, asit seeks greater autonomy and control over its own future and operations.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (drupal7 and jackson-databind), Fedora (checkstyle and gradle), openSUSE (qemu and xen), SUSE (ffmpeg, kvm, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (libraw and python-urllib3).

Damien Le Moal and Naohiro Aota led a combined storage and filesystemsession at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit(LSFMM) on filesystem work that has been done for zoned block devices.These devices have multiple zones with different characteristics; usuallythere are zones that can only be written in sequential order as well asconventional zones that can be written in random order. The genesis of zonedblock devices is shingledmagnetic recording (SMR) devices, which were created to increase thecapacity of hard disks, but at the cost of some flexibility.

In a combined filesystem and storage session at the 2019 Linux Storage,Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit, Avri Altman wanted to discuss the"turbo-write" mode that is coming for UniversalFlash Storage (UFS) devices. He wanted to introduce this new featureto assembled developers and to get some opinions on how to support thismode in the kernel.

Version 3.4 of the Bison parser generator is out. "A particular focus was put on improving the diagnostics, which are nowcolored by default, and accurate with multibyte input. Their format wasalso changed, and is now similar to GCC 9's diagnostics."

By the time Linus Torvalds released the 5.2-rc1 kernelprepatch and closed the merge window for this development cycle, 12,064 non-merge changesetshad been pulled into the mainline repository — about 3,700 since our summary of the first "half" was written. Thus, aspredicted, the rate of change did slow during the latter part of the mergewindow. That does not mean that no significant changes have been merged,though; read on for a summary of what else has been merged for 5.2.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cups-filters, dhcpcd5, faad2, ghostscript, graphicsmagick, jruby, lemonldap-ng, and libspring-security-2.0-java), Fedora (gnome-desktop3, java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, libu2f-host, samba, sqlite, webkit2gtk3, xen, and ytnef), Mageia (docker, flash-player-plugin, freeradius, libsndfile, libxslt, mariadb, netpbm, python-jinja2, tomcat-native, and virtualbox), openSUSE (kernel and ucode-intel), and SUSE (kernel, kvm, libvirt, nmap, and transfig).

Wired looksat the security issues stemming from the complexity of the Bluetoothstandard. "Bluetooth has certainly been investigated to a degree, butresearchers say that the lack of intense scrutiny historically stems againfrom just how involved it is to even read the standard, much lessunderstand how it works and all the possible implementations. On the plusside, this has created a sort of security through obscurity, in whichattackers have also found it easier to develop attacks against otherprotocols and systems rather than taking the time to work out how to messwith Bluetooth."

Linus has released the 5.2-rc1 kernelprepatch and closed the merge window for this development cycle."Nothing particularly odd going on this merge window. I had sometravel in the middle of it, but to offset that I had a new fastertest-build setup, and most of the pull requests came in early (thank you)so my travels didn't actually end up affecting the merge window all thatmuch."

The ever-increasing complexity of the software stacks we work with has giventesting an important role. There was a recent intersection between theautomated testing being done by the Yocto Project (YP) and a bug introduced into the Linux kernel that gives some insight into what thefuture holds and the potential available with this kind of testing.

Six new stable kernels have been released: 5.1.3, 5.0.17,4.19.44, 4.14.120, 4.9.177, and 4.4.180. As usual, they contain importantfixes throughout the kernel tree; users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (jquery), Fedora (kernel-headers, php-typo3-phar-stream-wrapper, and python3), openSUSE (qemu, ucode-intel, and xen), Red Hat (chromium-browser, java-1.8.0-ibm, and rh-python35-python-jinja2), SUSE (containerd, docker, docker-runc, go, go1.11, go1.12, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, evolution, graphviz, kernel, qemu, and systemd), and Ubuntu (libmediainfo, libvirt, and Wireshark).

Over the past four years, LWN has covered the PythonLanguage Summit, but this year the Python Software Foundation (PSF) electedto go in a different direction, with coverage by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis onthe PSF blog. Those reports are being gathered on a summitpage; as of this writing there are two reports up with plenty more tocome. "The Python Language Summit is a small gathering of Pythonlanguage implementers, both the core developers of CPython and alternativePythons, held on the first day of PyCon. The summit features shortpresentations from Python developers and community members, followed bylonger discussions. The 2019 summit is the first held since Guido vanRossum stepped down as Benevolent Dictator for Life, replaced by afive-member Steering Council."

Even with radiators and fans, a system's CPUs can overheat. When thathappens, the kernel's thermal governor will cap the maximum frequency ofthat CPU to allow it to cool. The scheduler, however, is not aware that the CPU'scapacity has changed; it may schedule more work than optimal in the currentconditions, leading to a performance degradation. Recently, TharaGopinath didsome research and posted a patch set to address this problem. Thesolution adds an interface to inform the scheduler about thermal events sothat it can assign tasks better and thus improve the overall systemperformance.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.18.140 stable kernel. "Note, this is the LAST 3.18.y release that I will be doing onkernel.org. I know it has been marked as End-of-Life for quite sometime, but I have kept it alive due to a few million phones out there inthe wild that depend on it, and can not move to a new kernel base due tothem being stuck with a SoC vendor that does not work upstream.But, this does not mean the tree is dead, oh no, if only it were thateasy..." He and others will be updating the kernel in the AndroidOpen Source Project (AOSP) tree.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (freeradius, kernel, libvirt, and qemu-kvm), Debian (intel-microcode, linux-4.9, and samba), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, memcached, microcode_ctl, php-pecl-imagick, and samba), Mageia (kernel, kernel-linus, kernel-tmb, and microcode), openSUSE (389-ds, bzip2, jakarta-commons-fileupload, kernel, and pacemaker), Red Hat (flash-plugin and ruby), Scientific Linux (kernel, libvirt, qemu-kvm, and ruby), Slackware (rdesktop), and Ubuntu (libvirt).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 16, 2019 is available.

Over the past year, Python has moved on from the benevolent dictator forlife (BDFL) governance model since Guido van Rossum steppeddown from that role. In February, a new steering council was elected based onthe governance model that was adopted inDecember. At PyCon 2019 inCleveland, Ohio, the five members of the steering council took the stage for akeynote panel that was moderated by Python Software Foundation (PSF)executive director Ewa Jodlowska.

We contemplated putting together an LWN article on the "microarchitecturaldata sampling" (MDS) vulnerabilities, as we've done for pastspeculative-execution issues. But the truth of the matter is that it'sreally more of the same, and there is a lot of material out there on thenet already. So, for those who would like to learn more, here's a list ofresources.

<p>Amir Goldstein led a discussion on things that the two major networkfilesystems for Linux, Samba and NFS, could cooperate on at the end of dayone of the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. Inparticular, are there needs that both filesystems have that the kernel isnot currently providing? He had some ideas of areas that might be tackled,but was looking for feedback from the assembled filesystem developers.

Michael Crosby is one of the most influential developers working on Dockercontainers today, helping to lead development of containerd as well as serving as the Open Container Initiative (OCI)Technical Oversight Chair. At DockerCon 19, Crosby led astanding-room-only session, outlining the past, present and — moreimportantly — the future of Docker as a container technology. The earlyhistory of Docker is closely tied with Linux and, as it turns out, so too isDocker's future.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (drupal7, intel-microcode, kernel, and lemonldap-ng), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, libvirt, qemu-kvm, qemu-kvm-rhev, redhat-virtualization-host, rhvm-appliance, vdsm, virt:rhel, and wget), Scientific Linux (wget), SUSE (containerd, docker, docker-runc, go, go1.11, go1.12, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, kernel, libxslt, microcode_ctl, qemu, ucode-intel, and xen), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-hwe, linux-azure, linux-hwe, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oracle, linux-lts-trusty, linux-lts-xenial, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, qemu, and samba).

Here's a blog post from"Brent" on how PHP deserves another look. "Today I want to look at the bright side: let's focus on the things that have changed and ways to write clean and maintainable PHP code. I want to ask you to set aside any prejudice for just a few minutes.Afterwards you're free to think exactly the same about PHP as you did before. Though chances are you will be surprised by some of the improvements made to PHP in the last few years."

A new filesystem aimed at sharing host filesystems with KVM guests, virtio-fs, was the topic of a session led by Miklos Szeredi at the 2019 Linux Storage,Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit. The existing solution, which isbased on the 9P filesystem from Plan 9, has someshortcomings, he said. Virtio-fs is a prototype that uses the Filesystem inUserspace (FUSE) interface.

This round of kernel updates address a speculative-execution vulnerability foundin all Intel processors made since 2011. Greg Kroah-Hartman says in the 5.1.2 kernel patch: "Note, this release,and the other stable releases that are all being released right now at thesame time, just went out all contain patches that have only seen the"public eye" for about 5 minutes. So be forwarned, they might breakthings, they might not build, but hopefully they fix things. Odds are wewill be fixing a number of small things in this area for the next few weeksas things shake out on real hardware and workloads." In addition to5.1.2, stable kernels 5.0.16, 4.19.43, 4.14.119, and 4.9.176 are available. More information may befound in the Xensecurity advisory and this new in-kerneldocumentation.

The curtain has finally been lifted on the latest set ofspeculative-execution vulnerabilities. This one has the delightful name ofZombieLoad; it is also known as"microarchitectural data sampling", but what's the fun in that? Various x86processors stash data into hidden buffers that can, in some cases, berevealed via speculative execution. Exploits appear to be relativelyhard. See this pagefrom the kernel documentation for a fairly detailed description of theproblem, and thispage for mitigation information.

The fifthand final article in Adrian Ratiu's serieson eBPF delves into userspace tracing. "In our previous parts we focused on tracing the Linux kernel, for which the eBPF-based projects are, in our humble opinion, the most safe, widely available and useful methods (eBPF is fully upstreamed in Linux, guarantees a stable ABI, comes enabled by default in almost all distributions and integrates with all other tracing mechanisms). It has really become a no-brainer choice for kernel work. However, up until now, talking in-depth about userspace tracing was deliberately avoided because it merits special treatment, hence this full part 5 article devoted to it."

The planning process for the 2019 Linux Kernel and Maintainer's Summits(Lisbon, Portugal, September 9 to 12) hasbegun. If you have a topic that you would like to see discussed at eitherevent, now is the time to send in a proposal to theksummit-discuss list; click below for the details.

<p>Trond Myklebust and Bruce Fields led a session on some topics of interestin the NFS world at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, andMemory-Management Summit. Myklebust discussed the intersection of NFS andcontainers, as well adding TLS support to NFS. Fields also had somecontainer changes to discuss, along with a grab bag of other areas thatneed attention.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (flatpak, ghostscript, and python-jinja2), Debian (cups-filters, imagemagick, qt4-x11, and samba), Fedora (httpd and wpa_supplicant), openSUSE (freeradius-server, nmap, python-Jinja2, signing-party, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (java-1.7.1-ibm and java-1.8.0-ibm), Scientific Linux (python-jinja2), SUSE (cf-cli, java-1_8_0-openjdk, and libxslt), and Ubuntu (isc-dhcp, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, samba, and VCFtools).

<p>In the filesystems track at the 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, andMemory-Management Summit, Ted Ts'o led a discussion about an inode flag toindicate DAX files, which is meant to be applied to files that should bedirectly accessed without going through the page cache. XFS has such aflag, but ext4 and other filesystems do not. The semantics of what the flag would mean arenot clear to Ts'o (and probably others), so the intent of the discussionwas to try to nail those down.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (atftp, ghostscript, openjdk-7, and postgresql-9.4), Fedora (java-11-openjdk, mosquitto, and php), Mageia (bash, binutils, clamav, cronie, jasper, kernel, mxml, openexr, openssh, python, qt4, svgsalamander, sysstat, tar, and tcpreplay), openSUSE (openssl, python3, sqlite3, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Red Hat (bind, flatpak, freeradius:3.0, java-1.8.0-openjdk, python-jinja2, rh-ror42-rubygem-actionpack, rh-ror50-rubygem-actionpack, rh-ruby23-ruby, rh-ruby24-ruby, rh-ruby25-ruby, and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, bzip2, ImageMagick, jakarta-commons-fileupload, java-1_8_0-openjdk, pacemaker, python-Django1, samba, and sqlite3), and Ubuntu (postgresql-10, postgresql-11, postgresql-9.5).

The latest set of stable kernel updates consists of5.1.1,5.0.15,4.19.42,4.14.118, and4.9.175.Each contains the usual set of important fixes.

When he released the 5.1 kernel, LinusTorvalds noted that he had a family event happening in the middle of the5.2 merge window and that he would be offline for a few days in the middle.He appears to be trying to make up for lost time before it happens: over8,300 non-merge changesets have found their way into the mainline in thefirst four days. As always, there is a widevariety of work happening all over the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9, postgresql-9.6, qemu, and symfony), Fedora (kernel, kernel-tools, mod_cluster, rubygem-actioncable, rubygem-actionmailer, rubygem-actionpack, rubygem-actionview, rubygem-activejob, rubygem-activemodel, rubygem-activerecord, rubygem-activestorage, rubygem-activesupport, rubygem-rails, and rubygem-railties), openSUSE (wireshark), Red Hat (freeradius), Scientific Linux (freeradius), and Ubuntu (bind9 and wpa).

Eric Rescorla has written adetailed summary of how the Firefox add-on fiasco happened, how it wasaddressed, and how a repeat might be avoided. "First, we should havea much better way of tracking the status of everything in Firefox that is apotential time bomb and making sure that we don’t find ourselves in asituation where one goes off unexpectedly. We’re still working out thedetails here, but at minimum we need to inventory everything of thisnature."

The 2019 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit differedsomewhat from its predecessors in that it contained a fourth trackdedicated to the BPF virtual machine. LWN was unable to attend most ofthose sessions, but a couple of BPF-related talks were a part of thebroader program. Among those was a plenary talk by Dave Miller, describedas "a wholistic view" of why BPF is successful, its current state, andwhere things are going.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (drupal7, exiv2, filezilla, and libfilezilla), openSUSE (gnutls, GraphicsMagick, hostinfo, supportutils, and ovmf), Scientific Linux (flatpak and ghostscript), SUSE (mutt and samba), and Ubuntu (Monit).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 9, 2019 is available.

<p>The idea of "inheritance" is something that most students learn about earlyon when they are studying object-oriented programming (OOP). But one ofthe seminal books about OOP recommends favoring "composition" overinheritance. Ariel Ortiz came to PyCon in Cleveland, Ohio to describe the composition pattern and to explain the tradeoffs between usingit and inheritance.

Computer memory architecture is growing more complex over time, withdifferent types of memory attached to a CPU via a number of paths. Thekernel development community is duly working to make this memory availableto user space in an equally diverse set of ways. Two sessions at the 2019Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit presented possiblemechanisms and APIs to allow programs to work with the types of memory theyneed.

Christoph Lameter has spent years improving Linux for high-performancecomputing tasks. During the memory-management track of the 2019 LinuxStorage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit, he talked about theproblem of keeping up with a 400Gb/s network interface. At that speed,there simply is no time for the system to get its work done. Some ways ofimproving the situation are in sight, but it's a hard problem overall and,despite some progress, the situation is getting worse.