LWN.net

At his blog, Matthias Klumpp reflects on his experience writing the asgen tool for AppStream metadata generation using, of all things, the D programming language. "I started to implement the same examples in D just for fun, as I didn’t plan to use D (I was aiming at Go back then), but the language looked interesting. The D language had the huge advantage of being very familiar to me as a C/C++ programmer, while also having a rich standard library, which included great stuff like std.concurrency.Generator, std.parallelism, etc." What follows is a "huge braindump of things" Klumpp found enjoyable, including built-in unit-test support, safe functions, scope blocks, and documentation generation. After that, however, comes Klumpp's list of complaints—starting with the proprietary reference compiler and the not-quite-complete free-software compilers.

Arch Linux has updated chromium (multiple vulnerabilities), imagemagick (code execution), and quassel-core (denial of service).Debian has updated mercurial(code execution) and openafs (multiplevulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated mplayer2 (code execution).Fedora has updated firefox(F23: ) and libreoffice (F23:information leak).Mageia has updated ansible(M5: code execution), jenkins-remoting(M5: code execution), owncloud (M5: undisclosed vulnerabilities), quagga (M5: denial of service), quassel (M5: denial of service), and xstream (M5: enabled processing of external entities).openSUSE has updated firefox (13.1: multiple vulnerabilities),libopenssl0_9_8 (13.2, Leap 42.1:multiple vulnerabilities), and openssl (Leap 42.1: multiple vulnerabilities).Oracle has updated kernel 3.8.13 (O7; O6:denial of service), kernel 2.6.39 (O5; O6:denial of service), kernel 2.6.32 (O6; O5:denial of service), and kernel 4.1.12 (O7; O6:denial of service).SUSE has updated java-1_7_0-openjdk (SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities), java-1_8_0-openjdk (SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities), and ntp (SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities).

On his blog, Peter Hutterer answers an oft-asked question:"A recurring question I encounter is the question whether uinput or evdev should be the approach [to] implement some feature the user cares about. This question is unfortunately wrongly framed as uinput and evdev have no real overlap and work independent of each other. This post outlines what the differences are. Note that "evdev" here refers to the kernel API, not to the X.Org evdev driver.First, the easy flowchart: do you have to create a new virtual device that has a set of specific capabilities? Use uinput. Do you have to read and handle events from an existing device? Use evdev. Do you have to create a device and read events from that device? You (probably) need two processes, one doing the uinput bit, one doing the evdev bit."

In a blog post that likens software development to cabinetmaking, Havoc Pennington makes the case for cutting corners—but only the right corners:"Software remains a craft rather than a science, relying on the experience of the craftsperson. Like cabinetmakers, we proceed one step at a time, making judgments about what’s important and what isn’t at each step.A professional developer does thorough work when it matters, and cuts irrelevant corners that aren’t worth wasting time on. Extremely productive developers don’t have supernatural coding skills; their secret is to write only the code that matters.How can we do a better job cutting corners? I think we can learn a lot from people building tables and dressers."

On his blog, Mirko Boehm reports on a multi-day workshop where the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and the Peng! Collectiveteamed up to look at new and innovative ways to get out the message about free software."These campaigns translate abstract, distant risks or worries into concrete, tangible calls to action. By being provocative, they break the mold and reach a wide audience online and through traditional media. They are “cat content for social change”, as our tutors put it. Campaigners are being urged to stop preaching or complaining, and to start using positive communication combined with subversive PR work instead. Such messaging needs punchlines, which requires some kind of hyperbole – dadaism, hijacking attention, or provocation." (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

Debian has updated libpam-sshauth(privilege escalation) and libtasn1-6(denial of service).Debian-LTS has updated mplayer(code execution).Fedora has updated dhcp (F23:denial of service), obs-signd (F23:improper user ID matching), and openssl(F23: multiple vulnerabilities).Mageia has updated subversion(two vulnerabilities).openSUSE has updated java-1_7_0-openjdk (13.1: multiplevulnerabilities), libopenssl0_9_8 (13.1; 11.4:multiple vulnerabilities), and openssl (13.2; 13.1; 11.4: multiple vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated compat-openssl097g (SLE11: multiplevulnerabilities) and openssl (SLE12:multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated lcms2 (14.04:denial of service from 2013), openjdk-7 (15.10, 14.04: multiple vulnerabilities), openjdk-8 (16.04: multiple vulnerabilities), and samba (regression in previous security fix).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 5, 2016 is available.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernels 4.5.3, 4.4.9,and 3.14.68. All contain important fixesthroughout the tree.

One aspect of the heavily hyped Internet of Things (IoT) that can easily getoverlooked is that each of the Things one hooks up to the Internetinvariably spews out a near non-stop stream of data. While commercialIoT users—such as utility companies—generally have awell-established grasp of what data interests them and how to processit, the DIY crowd is better served by flexible tools that makeexploring and transforming data easy. Airbnb maintains anopen-source Python utility called Caravel that provides suchtools. There are many alternatives, of course, but Caravel does agood job at ingesting data and smoothly molding it into nice-lookinginteractive graphs—with a few exceptions.

Arch Linux has updated imlib2 (multiple vulnerabilities), jasper (multiple vulnerabilities), lib32-openssl (multiple vulnerabilities), and openssl (multiple vulnerabilities).CentOS has updated kernel (C6: two vulnerabilities).Debian has updated openssl (multiple vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated asterisk (multiple vulnerabilities), extplorer (cross-site scripting), minissdpd (denial of service), and openssl (multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated cacti (F23; F22: three vulnerabilities).openSUSE has updated Chromium (SPH for SLE12; Leap42.1; 13.2: multiple vulnerabilities), giflib (Leap42.1: denial of service), java-1_7_0-openjdk (13.2: multiplevulnerabilities), java-1_8_0-openjdk (13.2:multiple vulnerabilities), jq (Leap42.1; 13.2: heap buffer overflow), libgcrypt (Leap42.1: key leak), firefox, nss (Leap42.1, 13.2: multiplevulnerabilities), wireshark (Leap42.1,13.2: multiple vulnerabilities), xerces-j2(13.2: denial of service), and yast2-users(Leap42.1: empty passwords fields in /etc/shadow).Oracle has updated kernel (OL6: two vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated java-1.8.0-ibm (RHEL7: multiplevulnerabilities), jenkins (RHOSE3.1:multiple vulnerabilities), and kernel(RHEL6: two vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated kernel (SL6: two vulnerabilities).Slackware has updated openssl (multiple vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated openssl (SLE12:multiple vulnerabilities), openssl1(SLES11: multiple vulnerabilities), and kernel (SLE11-SP3, SOSC5, SMP2.1: multiple vulnerabilities).

The interfaces supported by Linux to provide access to information aboutprocesses and files have literally been around for decades. One mightthink that, by this time, they would have reached a state of relativeperfection. But things are not so perfect that developers are deterredfrom working on alternatives; the motivating factor in the two casesstudied here is the same: reducing the cost of getting information out ofthe kernel while increasing the range of information that is available.<p>Click below (subscribers only) for the full article from this week's KernelPage.

Mercurial revision-control system developer Mathias De Maré summarizesthe changes in the 3.7 and 3.8 releases."Mercurial 3.7 had a major focus on performance. This is — to a largedegree — due to large users like Facebook and Mozilla working on bothperformance and scalability."

The Linux Embedded Development Environment (or LEDE) project, a fork (or"spinoff") of OpenWrt, has announced its existence. "We are building an embedded Linux distribution that makes it easy fordevelopers, system administrators or other Linux enthusiasts to buildand customize software for embedded devices, especially wireless routers.[...]Members of the project already include a significant share of the mostactive members of the OpenWrt community.We intend to bring new life to Embedded Linux development by creating acommunity with a strong focus on transparency, collaboration anddecentralisation." The new project lives at lede-project.org. (Thanks to Mattias Mattsson).

Over at the grsecurity forums, Brad Spengler writes about a recently released proof of concept attack on the kernel using JIT spraying. "What happened next was the hardening of the BPF interpreter in grsecurity to prevent such future abuse: the previously-abused arbitrary read/write from the interpreter was now restricted only to the interpreter buffer itself, and the previous warn on invalid BPF instructions was turned into a BUG() to terminate execution of the exploit. I also then developed GRKERNSEC_KSTACKOVERFLOW which killed off the stack overflow class of vulns on x64.A short time later, there was work being done upstream to extend the use of BPF in the kernel. This new version was called eBPF and it came with a vastly expanded JIT. I immediately saw problems with this new version and noticed that it would be much more difficult to protect -- verification was being done against a writable buffer and then translated into another writable buffer in the extended BPF language. This new language allowed not just arbitrary read and write, but arbitrary function calling." The protections in the grsecurity kernel will thus prevent this attack. In addition, the newly released RAP feature for grsecurity, which targets the elimination of return-oriented programming (ROP) vulnerabilities in the kernel, will also ensure that "the fear of JIT spraying goes away completely", he said.

Debian-LTS has updated openjdk-7 (multiple vulnerabilities) and smarty3 (code execution).Fedora has updated php (F23: multiple vulnerabilities).Gentoo has updated git (multiple vulnerabilities).Oracle has updated mercurial(OL7: two vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated mercurial (SL7: two vulnerabilities).Slackware has updated mercurial (code execution).Ubuntu has updated libtasn1-3,libtasn1-6 (15.10, 14.04, 12.04: denial of service), libtasn1-6 (16.04: denial of service), openssl (multiple vulnerabilities), poppler (15.10, 14.04, 12.04: multiplevulnerabilities), and firefox (12.04:denial of service).

The Androidsecurity bulletin for May is available. It lists 40 different CVEnumbers addressed by the May over-the-air update; the bulk of those are ata severity level of "high" or above. "Partners were notified aboutthe issues described in the bulletin on April 04, 2016 or earlier. Sourcecode patches for these issues will be released to the Android Open SourceProject (AOSP) repository over the next 48 hours. We will revise thisbulletin with the AOSP links when they are available. The most severe ofthese issues is a Critical security vulnerability that could enable remotecode execution on an affected device through multiple methods such asemail, web browsing, and MMS when processing media files."

The International Day Against DRM is May 3. "Participate in personat one of the planned events, or join us Tuesday on dayagainstdrm.org forways to take action against DRM. There will also be a list of discountedebook offerings from stores participating in the Day."

Arch Linux has updated firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).CentOS has updated mercurial (C7:two vulnerabilities).Debian has updated botan1.10 (multiple vulnerabilities), chromium-browser (multiple vulnerabilities), poppler (code execution), and tardiff (two vulnerabilities).Debian-LTS has updated botan1.10 (multiple vulnerabilities), gdk-pixbuf (two vulnerabilities), mysql-5.5 (multiple vulnerabilities), poppler (code execution), and subversion (two vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated ansible (F23; F22: codeexecution), firefox (F23: multiplevulnerabilities), gd (F23: code execution),openvas-cli (F23: cross-site scripting), openvas-gsa (F23: cross-site scripting), openvas-libraries (F23: cross-site scripting),openvas-manager (F23: cross-sitescripting), openvas-scanner (F23: cross-site scripting), roundcubemail (F23; F22: multiple vulnerabilities), and xen (F23; F22: multiple vulnerabilities).Mageia has updated chromium-browser-stable (multiple vulnerabilities), firefox (multiple vulnerabilities), pgpdump (denial of service), php (multiple vulnerabilities), php-ZendFramework (multiple vulnerabilities), and roundcubemail (three vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated chromium-browser (RHEL6: multiplevulnerabilities), java-1.6.0-ibm (RHEL5,6:multiple vulnerabilities), java-1.7.0-ibm(RHEL5: multiple vulnerabilities), java-1.7.1-ibm (RHEL7: multiplevulnerabilities), mercurial (RHEL7: twovulnerabilities), and rh-mysql56-mysql(RHSCL: multiple vulnerabilities).Slackware has updated ntp (multiple vulnerabilities), php (multiple vulnerabilities), and subversion (two vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated ubuntu-core-launcher (16.04: code execution).

The "linux-insides" series of articles has gained anoverview of inline assembly in GCC. "I've decided to write thisto consolidate my knowledge related to inline assembly here. As inlineassembly statements are quite common in the Linux kernel and we may seethem in linux-insides parts sometimes, I thought that it would be useful ifwe would have a special part which contains descriptions of the moreimportant aspects of inline assembly. Of course you may find comprehensiveinformation about inline assembly in the official documentation, but I likethe rules all in one place."

The 4.6-rc6 kernel prepatch is out. Linussays: "Things continue to be fairly calm, although I'm pretty sureI'll still do an rc7 in this series." As of this prepatch the codename has been changed to "Charred Weasel."

The Devuan community has finally gotten a beta release out for testing."Debian GNU+Linux [sic] is a fork of Debian without systemd,on its way to become much more than that. This Beta release marks an importantmilestone towards the sustainability and the continuation of Devuan asan universal base distribution."

At the Mozilla blog, Andy McKay announcesthat the browser maker has officially declared WebExtensions ready touse for add-on development. "With the release of Firefox 48, we feel WebExtensions arein a stable state. We recommend developers start to use theWebExtensions API for their add-on development." TheWebExtensions support released for Firefox 48 includes improvements tothe "alarms,bookmarks,downloads,notifications,webNavigation,webRequest,windowsand tabs"APIs, support for a new Content Security Policy that limits whereresources can be loaded from, and support in Firefox for Android. LWNlooked at the WebExtensions API in December.

Debian has updated subversion (multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated i7z (F23:denial of service).openSUSE has updated php5(Leap 42.1: multiple vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated ntp (SLE11; SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities).

The Association for Computing Machinery has announced therecipients of its 2015 technical awards. They are Brent Walters, MichaelLuby, Eric Horvitz, and: "Richard Stallman, recipient of the ACMSoftware System Award for the development and leadership of GCC (GNUCompiler Collection), which has enabled extensive software and hardwareinnovation, and has been a lynchpin of the free software movement."

The resultsof the X.Org election are in. There were two things up for a vote: fourseats on the board of directors and amending the bylaws to join Software in the Public Interest (SPI).Unlike last year's election, this year'svote met the required 2/3 approval to joinSPI (61 voters out of 65 members, with 54 voting "Yes", 4 "No", and 3 "Abstain"). In addition,Egbert Eich, Alex Deucher, Keith Packard, and Bryce Harrington were electedto the board.

CentOS has updated firefox (C6; C5:multiple vulnerabilities).Debian has updated iceweasel (multiple vulnerabilities) and php5 (multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated kernel (F23:two vulnerabilities) and libtasn1 (F22:denial of service).openSUSE has updated php5 (13.2:multiple vulnerabilities, including one from 2014).SUSE has updated php5 (SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities,including one from 2014).Ubuntu has updated libsoup2.4(16.04, 15.10, 14.04: regression in previous update), oxide-qt (16.04, 15.10, 14.04: multiple vulnerabilities), php5 (15.10: regression in previous update), and thunderbird (multiple vulnerabilities).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 28, 2016 is available.

Firefox 46.0 has been released, featuring improved security of theJavaScript Just In Time (JIT) Compiler and GTK3 integration. See the releasenotes for more details.

CentOS has updated firefox (C7: multiple vulnerabilities).Debian has updated mysql-5.5 (multiple vulnerabilities) and openjdk-7 (multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated rpm (F23: two vulnerabilities) and xstream (F23; F22: enabled processing of external entities).Gentoo has updated libksba (three vulnerabilities) and wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities).Mageia has updated libgd (code execution), samba (multiple vulnerabilities), w3m (denial of service), and wireshark (multiple vulnerabilities).Oracle has updated firefox (OL7; OL6; OL5: multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated firefox(RHEL5,6,7: multiple vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated firefox (SL5,6,7: multiple vulnerabilities).Slackware has updated firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).

Version 6.1 of the GCC compiler suite is out. Changes in this releaseinclude defaulting to the C++14 standard, improved diagnostic output, fullsupport for OpenMP 4.5, better optimization, and more; see the changelog for a fulllist.

InfoWorld introducesFuthark, an open source functional programming language designed forcreating code that runs on GPUs. It can automatically generate both C andPython code to be integrated with existing apps. "Most GPU programming involves using frameworks like OpenCL or CUDA, both of which use variations of C or C++ to generate code that runs on the GPU. Futhark can generate C code, but is its own language, more similar to Haskell or Standard ML than C. (Futhark is itself written in Haskell.)Futhark's creators claim that the expressiveness of the language makes it easier to describe complex operations that use parallelism. This includes the ability to support nested parallelizations (parallel operations inside other parallel operations). Futhark can do this "despite the complexities of efficiently mapping to the flat parallelism supported by hardware, as a great many programs depend on this feature," say the language's creators."

CentOS has updated nspr (C5: twovulnerabilities), nss (C5: twovulnerabilities), nspr (C7: twovulnerabilities), nss (C7: twovulnerabilities), nss-softokn (C7: twovulnerabilities), and nss-util (C7: two vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated ansible1.9 (F23; F22: codeexecution), golang (F23; F22: denial of service), gsi-openssh(F23; F22:command injection), mingw-poppler (F23; F22: codeexecution), mod_nss (F23; F22: invalid handling of +CIPHER operator),and webkitgtk4 (F22: multiple vulnerabilities).openSUSE has updated flash-player(11.4: code execution).Oracle has updated nss and nspr(OL5: two vulnerabilities) and nss, nspr,nss-softokn, and nss-util (OL7: three vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated nss,nspr, nss-softokn, nss-util (SL7: two vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated php53(SLE11-SP4: multiple vulnerabilities), portus (SLEM12: multiple vulnerabilities), andxen (SLES11-SP2: multiple vulnerabilities).

The Mozilla Foundation has (in the guise of Gervase Markham) posted anupdate on the process of spinning off the Thunderbird mail client as aseparate project. As part of that, they engaged Simon Phipps to write upasurvey of possible new homes [PDF] for the project. "Havingreviewed the destinations listed below together with several others whichwere less promising, I believe there are three viable choices for a futurehome for the Thunderbird Project; Software Freedom Conservancy, TheDocument Foundation and a new deal at the Mozilla Foundation. None of thesethree is inherently the best, and it is possible that over time the projectmight seek to migrate to a 'Thunderbird Foundation' as a permanent home(although I would not recommend that as the next step)."

Arduino has announcedthe release of the source code for the real-time operating system(RTOS) powering the Arduino 101 and Genuino 101. "The packagecontains the complete BSP (Board Support Package) for the Curie processoron the 101. It allows you to compile and modify the core OS and thefirmware to manage updates and the bootloader. (Be careful with this onesince flashing the wrong bootloader could brick your board and require aJTAG programmer to unbrick it)." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

Arch Linux has updated pgpdump(denial of service), samba (multiplevulnerabilities), squid (multiplevulnerabilities), and thunderbird (two vulnerabilities).Debian has updated imlib2 (multiple vulnerabilities) and libgd2 (code execution).Fedora has updated java-1.8.0-openjdk (F23: multiplevulnerabilities), openssh (F23: privilegeescalation), parallel (F23; F22: file overwrites),python-tgcaptcha2 (F23; F22: reusable captchas), thunderbird (F23: multiple vulnerabilities),w3m (F23: denial of service), and webkitgtk4 (F23: multiple vulnerabilities).Mageia has updated java-1.8.0-openjdk (multiple vulnerabilities), libcryptopp (information disclosure), squid (denial of service), varnish (access control bypass), and vtun (denial of service).openSUSE has updated Chromium (13.2; 13.1:multiple vulnerabilities) and clamav(Leap42.1: database refresh).Red Hat has updated nss, nspr(RHEL5: two vulnerabilities) and nss, nspr,nss-softokn, nss-util (RHEL7: two vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated nss,nspr (SL5: two vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated yast2-users(SLE12-SP1: empty passwords fields in /etc/shadow).Ubuntu has updated mysql-5.7(16.04: multiple vulnerabilities).

Linus has released the 4.6-rc5 kernelprepatch. "Things continue to be fairly calm: rc5 is bigger than rc4 was, but rc4really was tiny.And while we're back to fairly normal commit counts for this time inthe release window, the kinds of bugs people are finding remain verylow grade: there's absolutely nothing scary in here. If thingscontinue this way, this might be one of those rare releases that don'teven get to rc7."

At his blog, Lubomir Rintel highlights some of the changes found in the new 1.2 release of Network Manager, the network-configuration utility suite shipped by many Linux distributions. High on the list are privacy improvements; the post notes that "the identity of a mobile host can also leak via Wi-Fi hardware addresses. A common way to solve this is to use random addresses when scanning for available access points, which is what NetworkManager now does (with a recent enough version of wpa_supplicant). The actual hardware address is used only after the device is associated to an access point." Network Manager can also now be used to manage tun, tap, macvlan, vxlan and IP tunnel software devices, and can run multiple VPN modules simultaneously. In addition, support for several hardware device classes was split into loadable modules, which will reduce memory overhead.

CentOS has updated java-1.7.0-openjdk (C6; C5; C7: multiple vulnerabilities) and java-1.8.0-openjdk (C6; C7: multiple vulnerabilities).Debian has updated varnish(access control bypass) and xen(multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated drupal7-block_class (F23; F22:cross-site scripting),glpi (F23; F22: SQL injection), libtasn1 (F23: denial of service), and springframework-amqp (F22: code execution).Mageia has updated chromium-browser-stable (M5: multiple vulnerabilities), imlib2 (M5: code execution), lha (M5: buffer overflow), and poppler (M5: denial of service).Oracle has updated java-1.7.0-openjdk (O7; O6; O5: multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated java-1.6.0-sun (RHEL 5,6,7: multiple vulnerabilities),java-1.7.0-openjdk (RHEL 5,7; RHEL6: multiple vulnerabilities), java-1.7.0-oracle (RHEL 5,6,7: multiple vulnerabilities), and java-1.8.0-oracle (RHEL 6,7: multiple vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated java-1.7.0-openjdk (SL 5,7; SL6: multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated mysql-5.5,mysql-5.6 (12.04, 14.04, 15.10: multiple vulnerabilities) and php5 (12.04, 14.04, 15.10: multiple vulnerabilities).

The Ubuntu team has announced the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS forDesktop, Server, Cloud, and Core. "Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is thefirst long-term support release available for the new "s390x" architecture forIBM LinuxONE and z Systems, as well as introducing the new Ubuntu MATEcommunity flavour." Joining Ubuntu in this release are the flavorsKubuntu, Lubuntu, Mythbuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE,Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu. Maintenance updates will be provided for 5years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, andUbuntu Kylin. All the remaining flavors will be supported for 3 years.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the latest batch of stable kernels:4.5.2, 4.4.8, and 3.14.67. Each contains updates and fixesthroughout the tree.

Fedora has updated springframework-amqp (F23: code execution).openSUSE has updated giflib (13.2; 13.1:denial of service)and xerces-c (Leap 42.1: code execution).Oracle has updated java-1.8.0-openjdk (O7; O6: multiple vulnerabilities).Red Hat has updated java-1.8.0-openjdk (RHEL6; RHEL7:multiple vulnerabilities).Scientific Linux has updated java-1.8.0-openjdk (SL6; SL7: multiple vulnerabilities).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 21, 2016 is available.

Mesosphere has announcedthe release of DC/OS under the ApacheLicense 2.0. "DC/OS derives from Mesosphere’s Datacenter Operating System, a commercial product built around Apache Mesos. Open sourcing DCOS has always been part of our strategic roadmap and we’re proud to have collaborated with our launch partners for today’s unveiling.DC/OS is a software platform that’s 100 percent open source, comprised ofmore than 30 component technologies, including Apache Mesos andMarathon. Some of the technologies were always open source, includingMesos, while others were previously proprietary code developed byMesosphere, such as the GUI and our Minuteman load balancer." Over60 partner companies participated in the open source release.

Fedora has updated kernel (F23: three vulnerabilities).openSUSE has updated apparmor(13.1: profile updates), samba (13.1; 11.4:multiple vulnerabilities), and tiff (13.1: denial of service).SUSE has updated samba(SLES10-SP4: three vulnerabilities) and kernel (SLE11-SP4: multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated firefox(regressions in previous update).

One of the key advantages of persistent memory is that it is, for lack of abetter word, persistent; data stored there will be available for recall inthe future, regardless of whether the system has remained up in themeantime. But, like memory in general, persistent memory can fail for anumber of reasons and, given the quantities in which it is expected to be deployed, failures are acertainty. How should the operating system and applications deal witherrors in persistent memory? One of the first plenary sessions at the 2016 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory-Management Summit, led by Jeff Moyer,took on this question.

Fedora has updated libreswan(F22: denial of service).openSUSE has updated systemd(13.2: two vulnerabilities).

Google has announcedthe availability of the Androidsecurity 2015 year in review [PDF]. "Android’s open source modelhas also allowed device manufacturers to introduce new securitycapabilities. Samsung KNOX, for example, has taken advantage of uniquehardware capabilities to strengthen the root of trust on Samsungdevices. Samsung has also introduced new kernel monitoring capabilities ontheir Android devices. Samsung is not unique in their contributions to theAndroid ecosystem. Blackberry has worked to enhance the security of theirdevices by enabling kernel hardening and other features in the BlackberryPRIV. CopperheadOS has both introduced security improvements to their ownversion of Android and made significant contributions to the Android OpenSource Project. These are just some of the various contributions madepossible through open sourcing that improved the Android ecosystem in2015."

Christian Schaller celebratesthe completion of the (informal) first phase of the Fedora Workstationproject. "Another major piece of engineering that is coming to aclose is moving major applications such as Firefox, LibreOffice and Eclipseto GTK3. This was needed both to get these applications able to runnatively on Wayland, but it also enabled us to make them work nicely forHiDPI. This has also played out into how GTK3 have positioned itself whichto be a toolkit dedicated to pushing the Linux desktop forward and helpingthat quickly adapt and adopt to changes in the technologylandscape."

Matthew Garrett remembersDavid MacKay, shortly after his passing. "I was already aware ofthe importance of free software in terms of developers, but working withDavid made it clear to me how important it was to users as well. Acommunity formed around Dasher, helping us improve it and allowing us todevelop support for new use cases that made the difference between someonebeing able to type at two words per minute and being able to managetwenty. David saw that this collaborative development would be vital tocreating something bigger than his original ideas, and it succeeded in wayshe couldn't have hoped for." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

Arch Linux has updated chromium (multiple vulnerabilities) and libtasn1 (denial of service).Debian has updated fuseiso (two vulnerabilities), openssh (privilege escalation), and tomcat7 (multiple vulnerabilities).Fedora has updated firefox (F23:multiple vulnerabilities) and xerces-c(F22: code execution).openSUSE has updated Chromium (Leap42.1; 13.1: multiple vulnerabilities), gcc5 (Leap42.1: predictable random values), krb5 (Leap42.1: null pointer dereference), mercurial (Leap42.1: three vulnerabilities),optipng (Leap42.1; 13.2: three vulnerabilities), perl-YAML-LibYAML (Leap42.1: threevulnerabilities, one from 2013), samba(13.2: multiple vulnerabilities), and tiff(13.2: denial of service).Red Hat has updated chromium-browser (RHEL6: multiple vulnerabilities).Slackware has updated thunderbird (multiple vulnerabilities) and samba (multiple vulnerabilities).SUSE has updated Chromium(SPH for SLE12: multiple vulnerabilities) and openssl (SOSC5&SM2.1: multiple vulnerabilities).Ubuntu has updated optipng (multiple vulnerabilities) and samba (multiple vulnerabilities).