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Stable kernels 4.9.54, 4.4.91, and 3.18.74 have been released. They all containimportant fixes and users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel and postgresql), Debian (botan1.10, curl, dnsmasq, libxfont, nautilus, qemu, qemu-kvm, sam2p, and tor), Fedora (dnsmasq, libmspack, and samba), Gentoo (file, icu, libpcre2, munin, ocaml, pacemaker, postgresql, rubygems, and sudo), Mageia (clamav, dnsmasq, flightgear, libidn, and x11-server), openSUSE (libvirt), Oracle (kernel), SUSE (portus), and Ubuntu (poppler).

The 4.14-rc4 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. "So I do have some hope that things are approachingnormal. I'd expect that to continue, and things start calming down."

The Debian 9.2 point release is available; it includes fixes for a longlist of problems. "As a special case for this point release, thoseusing the 'apt-get' tool to perform the upgrade will need to ensure thatthe 'dist-upgrade' command is used, in order to update to the latest kernelpackages."

Version 235 of the systemd service manager is out; it includes a long listof new features. See this blogpost for a description of the dynamic user feature in particular."One major benefit of dynamic user IDs is that running aprivilege-separated service leaves no artifacts in the system. A systemuser is allocated and made use of, but it is discarded automatically in asafe and secure way after use, in a fashion that is safe for laterrecycling. Thus, quickly invoking a short-lived service for processing somejob can be protected properly through a user ID without having topre-allocate it and without this draining the available UID pool any longerthan necessary."

"Jprobes" are an ancient kernel mechanism used to trace entry into kernelfunctions; they were described in this 2005 LWNarticle. Recently, the kernel community has come to the conclusionthat jprobes have few (if any) remaining users, they have long beensuperseded by the function tracing (ftrace) mechanism, and they are amaintenance burden. As a result, the jprobeAPI will likely be disabled in a near-future kernel. If anybody outthere is still using jprobes, now would be a good time to either move on ormake the case for retaining that feature in the kernel.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (curl, krb5, lib32-curl, lib32-krb5, lib32-libcurl-compat, lib32-libcurl-gnutls, libcurl-compat, and libcurl-gnutls), Debian (golang), Fedora (MySQL-zrm), Mageia (firefox, ghostscript, libgd, libraw, libwpd, open-vm-tools, poppler, and rawtherapee), Oracle (kernel and postgresql), Red Hat (kernel), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (curl, openjpeg, and xorg), and Ubuntu (ruby1.9.1).

What kind of cell phone would emerge from a concerted effort to design privacy in fromthe beginning, using free software as much as possible? Someanswers are provided by a crowdfunding campaign launched inAugust by Purism SPC, which has used two suchcampaigns successfully in the past to build a business around securelaptops. The Librem 5, with a five-inch screen and radio chip forcommunicating with cell phone companies, represents Purism's hope to bringthe same privacy-enhancing vision to the mobile space, which is much moredemanding in its threats, technology components, and user experience.

An attacker who seeks to compromise a running kernel by overwritingkernel data structures or forcing a jump to specific kernel code must, ineither case, have some idea of where the target objects are in memory.Techniques like kernel address-space layout randomization have been createdin the hope of denying that knowledge, but that effort is wasted if the kernelleaks information about where it has been placed in memory. Developershave been plugging pointer leaks for years but, as a recent discussionshows, there is still some disagreement over the best way to preventattackers from learning about the kernel's address-space layout.

SUSE has announcedthat SUSE Studio and the Open Build Service (OBS) will be merged into acombined solution, delivered as SUSE Studio Express."Looking at the feature requests for SUSE Studio on image buildingand looking at our technologies, we decided to use OBS as the base for ourimage building service. Since OBS already builds images for various environments, we will first add a new image building GUI to OBS."

The latest batch of stable kernels has been released: 4.13.5, 4.9.53, 4.4.90, and 3.18.73 are now available. As usual, theycontain fixes throughout the tree; users of those series should upgrade.

The 2017 GNU Tools Cauldron was held September 8 to 10 inPrague. Videos from thesessions are now available. The sessions cover ongoing work with GCC,the GDB debugger, the GNU C Library, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk and curl), Fedora (kernel), Red Hat (postgresql and samba), Scientific Linux (postgresql), and Ubuntu (firefox and git).

PyPy is a Python interpreter with a focus on performance; the project hasjust announcedits 5.9 release. This version has full support for NumPy and Pandas inPython 2.7, along with many other improvements. The Python 3.5interpreter is still described as "beta quality".

Version 10 of thePostgreSQL database management system has been released. "A criticalfeature of modern workloads is the ability to distribute data across manynodes for faster access, management, and analysis, which is also known as a'divide and conquer' strategy. The PostgreSQL 10 release includessignificant enhancements to effectively implement the divide and conquerstrategy, including native logical replication, declarative tablepartitioning, and improved query parallelism." See therelease notes and this LWN article fromJune for details.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 5, 2017 is available.

A lot was discussed and presented in the three hours allotted to the Testingand Fuzzing microconference at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference(LPC), but some spilled out of that slot. We have already looked at some discussions on kernel testing that occurred both before and during themicroconference. Much of the rest of the discussion is summarized in thearticle from this week's edition, which subscribers can access from thelink below.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk and qemu), openSUSE (liblouis, libraw, nextcloud, and tiff), and Ubuntu (ocaml).

The LEDE project has announced a "service release" of its routerdistribution. "LEDE 17.01.3 'Reboot' incorporates a fair number offixes back ported from the development branch during the last sixteenweeks." Included therein is a pile of security updates, includingfixes for the recently disclosed dnsmasq vulnerabilities.

Odoo is, according to Wikipedia,"the most popular open source ERP system." Thus, any survey of open-source accounting systems must certainly take alook in that direction. This episode in theongoing search for a suitable accounting system for LWN examines theaccounting features of Odoo; unfortunately, it comes up a bit short.

The Evergreen community has announced therelease of Evergreen 3.0.0, software for libraries. This releaseincludes community support of the web staff client for production use,serials and offline circulation modules for the web staff client,improvements to the display of headings in the public catalog browse list,and more.

Fedora Magazine has announcedthe release of Fedora 27 beta, including Fedora Workstation and FedoraAtomic Host. For those wondering about the server edition, thisarticle has the answer. "The Modularity project was designed to allow shipping different parts of the projects on different timelines. So, the Server team is starting that now — expect a Fedora 27 Server beta powered by Modularity in a few weeks. The general Fedora 27 release will come in early November, and then Fedora 27 Server will arrive in final form about a month later."

FreeBSD 10.4 has been released.This release features full support for eMMC storage, as well as manyupdates and improvements. The releasenotes contain more details.

Jens Axboe is themaintainer of the block layer of the kernel. In this capacity,he spoke at Kernel Recipes2017 on what's new in the storage world for Linux, with a particular focus on the new block-multiqueue subsystem:the degree to which it's been adopted, a number of optimizations thathave recently been made, and a bit of speculation abouthow it will further improve in the future.Subscribers can click below for a report from the Kernel Recipes talk byguest author Tom Yates.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dnsmasq), Debian (dnsmasq and git), Fedora (ejabberd, firefox, mingw-LibRaw, openvpn, and perl), openSUSE (dnsmasq, git, Mozilla Firefox and NSS, and otrs), Oracle (dnsmasq), Red Hat (dnsmasq), Scientific Linux (dnsmasq), Slackware (dnsmasq), SUSE (dnsmasq), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, firefox, libidn, and poppler).

While the adoption of OpenPGP by the general population is marginal atbest, it is a critical component for the security community andparticularly for Linux distributions. For example, every packageuploaded into Debian is verified by the central repository using themaintainer's OpenPGP keys and therepository itself is, in turn, signed using a separate key. If upstream packages also use such signatures, thiscreates a complete trust path from the original upstream developer tousers.Beyond that, pull requests for the Linux kernel are verified using signatures as well.Therefore, the stakes are high: a compromise of the release key, oreven of a single maintainer's key, could enable devastatingattacks against many machines.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (dnsmasq), CentOS (firefox and nss), Debian (firefox-esr, ghostscript, libidn2-0, opencv, and otrs2), Fedora (moodle, php-horde-nag, php-horde-passwd, php-horde-wicked, php-symfony-security-acl, pkgconf, and xen), openSUSE (spice and weechat), Scientific Linux (firefox and nss), Slackware (openexr), SUSE (xen), and Ubuntu (ca-certificates, dnsmasq, and nss).

James Morris has posted asummary of the recently concluded Linux Security Summit."I was particularly interested in the topic of better integrating LSMwith containers, as there is an increasingly common requirement for nestingof security policies, where each container may run its own apparentlyindependent security policy, and also a potentially independent securitymodel. I proposed the approach of introducing a security namespace, whereall security interfaces within the kernel are namespaced, including LSM.It would potentially solve the container use-cases, and also the full LSMstacking case championed by Casey Schaufler (which would allow entirelyarbitrary stacking of security modules)."

The Google Security Blog disclosesthe results of a security audit of the Dnsmasq name resolver."We discovered seven distinct issues (listed below) over the courseof our regular internal security assessments. Once we determined theseverity of these issues, we worked to investigate their impact andexploitability and then produced internal proofs of concept for each ofthem. We also worked with the maintainer of Dnsmasq, Simon Kelley, toproduce appropriate patches and mitigate the issue."Version 2.78 contains the fixes. Anybody running an OpenWRT/LEDE routerlikely has a vulnerable version of Dnsmasq and will want to look into updating.

The 4.14-rc3 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. "So 4.14 continues to be a somewhat painful release, andI'm starting to at least partly blame the fact that it's meant to be an LTSrelease."

The Core Infrastructure Initiative commissioned security audits of threenetwork time protocol (NTP) implementations (ntpd, NTPSec, and Chrony) andhas releasedthe results. "From a security standpoint (and here at the CII weare security people), Chrony was the clear winner between these three NTPimplementations. Chrony does not have all of the bells and whistles thatntpd does, and it doesn’t implement every single option listed in the NTPspecification, but for the vast majority of users this will not matter. Ifall you need is an NTP client or server (with or without reference clock),which is all that most people need, then its security benefits most likelyoutweigh any missing features."

Ars technica reportson an announcement that the kernel's long-term support releases will now bemaintained for six years instead of two. "A six-year support windowwill give Google, SoC Vendors, and OEMs plenty of time to develop a deviceand get it to market, while still leaving about four years for end-userownership. Google currently provides two years of major OS updates on itsphones and three years of security updates, but if it wanted to extendthat, an announcement like this would seem like an important firststep." The kernel.org releasespage now shows 4.4 being maintained through February 2022.

Free-software raw photo editor RawTherapee released a major newrevision earlier this year, followed by a string of incrementalupdates. The 5.x series, released at a rapid pace, marks asignificant improvement in the RawTherapee's development tempo — theproject's preceding update had landed in 2014. Regardless of the speed ofthe releases themselves, however, the improved RawTherapee offers users alot of added functionality and may shake up the raw-photo-processingworkflow for many photographers.

The EFF highlightsa number of attacks against distributors of add-ons for the Kodi streaming media system."These lawsuits by big TV incumbents seem to have a few goals: toexpand the scope of secondary copyright infringement yet again, to forcemajor Kodi add-on distributors off of the Internet, and to smear anddiscourage open source, freely configurable media players by focusing onthe few bad actors in that ecosystem. The courts should reject theseexpansions of copyright liability, and TV networks should not targetneutral platforms and technologies for abusive lawsuits."

Allison Randal has sent out a message to the community saying that she ismoving on from the presidency of the Open Source Initiative."I'm incredibly proud of what the organization has accomplished in thattime, continuing stewardship of the open source license list, and growingour individual membership and affiliate programs which provide a path forthe entire open source community to have a say in the governance of theOSI." Her replacement will be Simon Phipps.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (ffmpeg2.8, nvidia, and openvpn), Fedora (git, mercurial, moodle, php-horde-Horde-Image, poppler, and pure-ftpd), openSUSE (fmpeg and vlc), Oracle (firefox, kernel, and nss), Red Hat (firefox and nss), Slackware (mozilla), and SUSE (firefox).

<p>As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomesever more populous, there is no shortage of people warning us that thecontinual infusion into our lives of hard-to-patch proprietary devices running hard-to-maintain proprietary code is a bitof a problem. It is an act of faith for some, myself included,that open devices running free software (whether IoT devices or not) areeasier to maintain than proprietary, closed ones. So it's always of interest when freedom (orsomething close to it) makesits way into a class of devices that were not previously so blessed.<p>Subscribers can click below for a look at the NumWorks graphing calculatorby guest author Tom Yates.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 4.13.4, 4.9.52, 4.4.89, and 3.18.72 stable kernels. As usual, there arefixes throughout the tree and users of those series should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (chromium-browser and poppler), Oracle (kernel), and Slackware (gegl).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 28, 2017 is available.

At lastyear's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC), James Jones began the process of coming up with an API forallocating memory so that it is accessible to multiple different graphicsdevices in a system (e.g. GPUs, hardware compositors, video decoders, displayhardware, cameras, etc.). At XDC 2017 in MountainView, CA, he was back to update attendees on the progress that has beenmade. He has a prototype in progress, but there is plenty more to do,including working out some of the problems he has encountered along the way.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced that Microsoft hasjoined the organization as a Premium Sponsor."Microsoft's history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License, then again in August of 2007 with the submission of the Microsoft Permissive License. For many in the open source software community, it was Microsoft's release of .NET in 2014 under an open source license that may have first caught their attention. Microsoft has increasingly participated in open source projects and communities as users, contributors, and creators, and has released even more open source products like Visual Studio Code and Typescript."

Oath, parent company of Yahoo, has announcedthat it has released Vespa as an open sourceproject on GitHub."Building applications increasingly means dealing with huge amounts of data. While developers can use the the Hadoop stack to store and batch process big data, and Storm to stream-process data, these technologies do not help with serving results to end users. Serving is challenging at large scale, especially when it is necessary to make computations quickly over data while a user is waiting, as with applications that feature search, recommendation, and personalization.By releasing Vespa, we are making it easy for anyone to build applicationsthat can compute responses to user requests, over large datasets, at realtime and at internet scale – capabilities that up until now, have beenwithin reach of only a few large companies." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

<p>In the refereed track at the 2017 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Jiri Kosinagave an update on the status and plans for the live kernel patchingfeature. It is a feature that has a long history—pre-dating Linuxitself—and has had a multi-year path into the kernel. Kosina reviewed thathistory, while also looking at some of the limitations and missingfeatures for live patching.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (weechat), Debian (debsecan, git, ruby1.8, ruby1.9.1, rubygems, and weechat), Fedora (kernel, libbson, and oniguruma), Gentoo (tiff), openSUSE (tor), Oracle (augeas, samba, and samba4), Red Hat (kernel), and Scientific Linux (kernel).

The Fedora project's four "foundations" arenamed "Freedom", "Friends", "Features", and "First". Among other things,they commit the project to being firmly within the free-software camp("we believe that advancing software and content freedom is a centralgoal for the Fedora Project, and that we should accomplish that goalthrough the use of the software and content we promote") and toproviding leading-edge software, including current kernels. Given that thekernel project, too, is focused on free software, it is interesting to seea call within the Fedora community to hold back on kernel updates in orderto be able to support a proprietary driver.

Ars technica takesa look at the Firefox 57 developer edition. "More important, but less immediately visible, is that Firefox 57 has received a ton of performance enhancement. Project Quantum has several strands to it: Mozilla has developed a new CSS engine, Stylo, that parses CSS files, applies the styling rules to elements on the page, and calculates object sizes and positions. There is also a new rendering engine, WebRender, that uses the GPU to draw the (styled) elements of the page. Compositor combines the individual rendered elements and builds them into a complete page, while Quantum DOM changes how JavaScript runs, especially in background tabs. As well as this new development, there's a final part, Quantum Flow, which has focused on fixing bugs and adding optimizations to those parts of the browser that aren't being redeveloped.WebRender is due to arrive in Firefox 59, but the rest of Quantum is part of Firefox 57."

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and libraw), Gentoo (chromium, libsoup, and rar), openSUSE (openjpeg and openjpeg2), Scientific Linux (samba), and Ubuntu (libplist).

Doing realtime processing with a general-purpose operating-system likeLinux can be a challenge by itself, but safety-critical realtime processingups the ante considerably. During a session at Open Source Summit NorthAmerica, Wolfgang Maurer discussed the difficulties involved in this kindof work and what Linux has to offer.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (bzr, clamav, libgd2, libraw, samba, and tomcat7), Fedora (drupal7-views, gnome-shell, httpd, krb5, libmspack, LibRaw, mingw-LibRaw, mpg123, pkgconf, python-jwt, and samba), Gentoo (adobe-flash, chromium, cvs, exim, mercurial, oracle-jdk-bin, php, postfix, and tcpdump), openSUSE (Chromium and libraw), Red Hat (chromium-browser), and Slackware (libxml2 and python).