Mozilla has announced that Puppeteer, a browser automation and testing library, now has first-class support for Firefox using theWebDriver BiDi protocol. Puppeteer can be used to drive headless browser instances, and is commonly used for automated end-to-end web-site tests.
The desire for the ability to checkpoint a process - to record its state ina form that can be restarted at a future time - on Linux is almost as old asLinux itself. See, for example, this announcement of a checkpointproject that appeared in LWN in 1998. While working solutions exist, theycan be somewhat fragile and difficult to use; it is not surprising thatsome people are interested in finding a better alternative. A currenteffort goes by the name CRIB,for Checkpoint/Restore in (naturally) BPF. It is far from clear that CRIBwill replace the existing solutions, but it is an interesting look at adifferent way of solving the problem.
There are lots of places in the kernel where an EINVAL can bereturned to user space, but it is often unclear what the actual underlyingproblem is because the errnoerror codes are too generic. That is the problem that Miklos Szerediwanted to discuss in a filesystem session that he led remotely at the 2024 Linux Storage,Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. He would like to helpthose who are trying to debug problems trace where in the kernel aparticular error code is being generated.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, openjdk-17, and wpa), Gentoo (aiohttp, Bitcoin, Cairo, Go, json-c, Levenshtein, libXpm, nghttp2, PostgreSQL, and Redis), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, python-setuptools, python-urllib3, python3.11-setuptools, and wget), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (bind, curl, docker, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, kernel, kernel-firmware, libnbd, patch, shadow, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (python-django and wpa).
CircuitPython is an open-sourceimplementation of the Python programming language for microcontrollerboards. The project, which is sponsored by Adafruit Industries, is designed withnew programmers in mind, but it also has many features that may be ofinterest to more-experienced developers. The recent 9.1.0releaseadds a few minor features, but it follows just a few months after CircuitPython9.0.0,which brings some more significant changes, including improved graphics andUSB support.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice), Gentoo (containerd and firefox), Red Hat (httpd), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, ksh, openssl-3-livepatches, podman, python-Twisted, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (imagemagick).
David Howells wanted to discuss changing the way filesystem code handlesthe ability to interrupt or kill operations, in order to fix somelongstanding problems with network (and other) filesystems, in a session atthe 2024 LinuxStorage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. As noted inhis sessionproposal, some filesystems may be expecting to not be interruptible,but are calling code can take locks and mutexes that are interruptible (orkillable), which are effectivelychanging the state of the task incorrectly.He would like to find a solution for that problem.
The BusinessSource License (BUSL) is a source-available license that "converts"to an open-source license after a period of time. In theory, thismeans that a few years after a version of a product is released underthe BUSL, it becomes open source and is fair game for Linuxdistributions to package along with regular open-source projects. Inpractice, the license throws a few curveballs that require specialconsideration and caution, as the Fedora Project recently discussed.
Version 2.43 of the GNU Binutils package is out. Changes include someimprovements to the assembler and the linker, better support for hardwareevent counters in the Gprofng profiler, and more.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-11), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, ffmpeg, hostapd, trafficserver, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (curl and linux-oem-6.5).
Linus has released 6.11-rc2 for testing."Hopefully we've gotten rid of the bulk of the silly noise here in rc2,and not added too much new noise, so that we can get on with the process offinding more meaningful issues."
The 6.10.3, 6.6.44, and 6.1.103 stable kernel updates have all been released. As usual, theycontain important fixes throughout the tree. Users of those kernelsshould upgrade.
There is ongoing discussion about the ethics and effectiveness oftelemetry following some recent LWN articles that touched onThunderbird's use of opt-outtelemetry and planned metrics in Fedora. TheInternet Security Research Group (ISRG), the nonprofit behindLet's Encrypt, has a potential solution to the problem of how to collect andaggregate telemetry without violating users' privacy. The scheme is based on adraftprotocol being standardized with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF),and has anopen-source implementationavailable.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium), SUSE (docker and patch), and Ubuntu (bind9, gross, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, and tomcat8, tomcat9).
Like many projects written in C, the kernel makes extensive use of the Cpreprocessor; indeed, the kernel's use is rather more extensive than most.The preprocessor famously has a number of sharp edges associated with it.One might not normally think of increased compilation time as one of them,though. It turns out that some changes to a couple of conceptually simplepreprocessor macros - min() and max() - led to some trulypathological, but hidden, behavior where those macros were used.
We have received thesad news that Dr. Mel Chua has passed away. Mel was probably bestknown in the free-software community as a contributor to the FedoraProject in its early days. The Fedora Community blog honoredMel recently after she had moved to hospice care with tributesfrom several Fedorans. Stephen Jacobs wrote:
Arnd Bergmann has posted adetailed timeline for the deprecation of support for old Arm CPUs inboth the kernel and the compiler toolchain. Anybody who is working withthat hardware will likely want to review this list and let the relevantdevelopers know if any of that support is still needed.
Version 2.0 of the Vanilla OS image-based Linux distribution hasbeen released. Dubbed"Orchid", Vanilla OS is now based on Debian Sid (prior versions were Ubuntu-based),allows creationof customized Linux environments, support for running Androidapplications using Waydroid, and many other improvements.
A few years ago, PyGObject-the Pythonpackage that provides bindings for GTK and GNOME applications-was notfaring particularly well. Several maintainers had left the project and itsdevelopment was not keeping pace with changes in GTK. At this year'sGUADEC, Dan Yeaw presented a talkabout the project's decline, improvements in the last year, and hisexperience getting involved in an undermaintained project.
Version 8.0 of the Forgejosoftware-development platform has been released. Notablechanges include the removalof non-free software found in the codebase, improved stability, and areductionin "seemingly random User Interface changes":
A bootstrappable build is one that builds existingsoftware from scratch - for example, building GCC without relying on an existingcopy of GCC. In 2023, the Guix projectannounced that the project had reduced the sizeof the binary bootstrap seed needed to build its operating system to just 357-bytes -not counting the Linux kernel required to run the build process. Now, thelive-bootstrap projecthas gone a step further and removed the need for an existing kernel at all.
At the 2024 LinuxStorage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John Groves leda session on famfs, which is a filesystem he has developed that uses thekernel's direct-access (DAX)mechanism to access memory that is shareable between hosts. The discussionwas aimed at whether a different approach should be taken and, inparticular, whether FUSE should be used instead of implementing as anin-kernel filesystem. As noted in the thread about hisproposal for an LSFMM+BPF session, and the mailing-list discussions on the first and secondversion of his patch set, there is some skepticism that a new in-kernelfilesystem is warranted for the use case.
At GUADECin Denver, Colorado on July21, the GNOME Foundation held its annualgeneral meeting (AGM) to provide updates from the foundation's board and committees.Topics included work accomplished in the past year, challengesfacing the GNOME Foundation-including fundraising and finding a newexecutive director-and some insight into plans for the next year. Andlast, but not least, the awarding of the Pants of Thanks.
Version 2.46.0 of the Gitsource-code management system has been released. This release seems toconsist of a long list of interface and performance improvements ratherthan big new features; see the announcement for the details.
The release of 6.11-rc1marked the end of the 6.11 merge window on July28. By that time,12,102 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository;about 8,000 of those came in after thefirst-half summary was written. Quite a few significant changes wereto be found in those changesets; there is also one big change that did notmake it.
Linus Torvalds has released 6.11-rc1 and closed themerge window for this development cycle. "The merge window felt prettynormal, and the stats all look pretty normal too. I was expecting things tobe quieter because of summer vacations, but that (still) doesn't actuallyseem to have been the case."Note that the extensible scheduler class("sched_ext") was not merged, even though Torvalds had said he would back in June. Sched_ext, itseems, will need another development cycle out of tree.
The6.10.2,6.9.12,6.6.43,6.1.102,5.15.164,5.10.223,5.4.281, and4.19.319stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains a relativelysmall set of important fixes, atleast one of which appears to close a minor security hole.
One of the simplest hardening concepts to understand is that memory shouldnever be both writable and executable, otherwise an attacker can use it toload and run arbitrary code. That rule is generally followed in Linuxsystems, but there is a glaring loophole that is exploitable from userspace to inject code into a running process. Attackers have duly exploitedit. A new effort to close the hole ran into trouble early in the mergewindow, but a solution may yet be found in time for the 6.11 kernelrelease.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (linux-firmware and squid), Debian (bind9), Fedora (kubernetes, thunderbird, and tinyproxy), Oracle (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-container, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Red Hat (freeradius:3.0, httpd, and squid), and SUSE (giflib and python-dnspython).
In the previous episode of thevgetrandom() story, Jason Donenfeld had put together a version ofthe getrandom()system call that ran in user space, significantly improving performance forapplications that need a lot of random data while retaining all of theguarantees provided by the system call. At that time, it seemed that aconsensus had built around the implementation and that it was headed towardthe mainline in that form. A few milliseconds after that article wasposted, though, a Linus-Torvalds-shaped obstacle appeared in its path.That obstacle has been overcome and this work has now been merged for the6.11 kernel, but its form has changed somewhat.
On July 12, Jocelyn Falempeproposed a change to the configuration options that Fedora sets for itskernels, in order to make kernel panics easier to report.Falempe would like to enable the kernel's recently addedDRM-panic feature, which addsa graphical crash screen that is reminiscent of the infamousWindows "blue screen of death" for kernel panics. The feature introduces a fewtradeoffs, including currently limited driver support, so the proposal spawned agood deal of discussion.
Version1.80.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the newLazyCell and LazyLock types (which delay datainitialization until the first access), the stabilization of theexclusive-range syntax for match patterns, and more.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Fedora (exim, python-zipp, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, and xmedcon), Red Hat (cups, fence-agents, freeradius, freeradius:3.0, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, podman, and resource-agents), Slackware (htdig and libxml2), SUSE (exim), and Ubuntu (ocsinventory-server, php-cas, and poppler).
Linux Mint has announced version 22 ofthe distribution in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Mint 22is based on Ubuntu 24.04 and uses kernel version 6.8.0:
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.10.1 stable kernel update. This releasecontains a small number of seemingly urgent regression fixes. Users ofthis kernel series are advised to upgrade.
Updated installation images for the OpenMandriva ROME rolling release Linux distribution are now available. Notable features in the24.07 snapshot include KDEPlasma6 as the default desktop, the addition of Proton and Protonexperimental packages for playing Windows games on Linux, as well as GNOME46.3 and LXQt2.0.0 spins.
David Howells wanted to discuss swap handling in light of multi-page foliosin a combined storage, filesystem, and memory-management session atthe 2024 Linux Storage,Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Swapping has always beendone with a one-to-one mapping of memory pages to swap slots, he said, butswapping multi-page folios breaks that assumption. He wondered if it wouldmake sense to use filesystem techniques to track swapped-out folios.
Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote atGUADEC2024 in Denver, Colorado that the Thunderbird mail client "probably shouldn't still be alive". Thunderbird, however, is not onlyalive-it is arguably in better shape than everbefore. According to Sipes, the project's turnaround is a result ofgovernance, storytelling, and learning to be comfortable asking usersfor money. He would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stoppedturning off telemetry.
Let's Encrypt hasannouncedthat it intends to end support "as soon as possible" for the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) over privacy concerns. OCSP was developed as alighter-weight alternative toCertificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) that did not involve downloadingthe entire CRL in order to check whether a certificate was valid. Let's Encrypt will continuesupporting OCSP as long as it is a requirement for Microsoft'sTrusted Root Program, but hopes to discontinue it soon:
LWN.net