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Debian does not have an official way to configurenetworking. Instead, it has fourrecommended ways to configure networking, one of which is thevenerable ifupdown, whichhas been part of Debian since the turn of the century and is showing itsage. A conversation about its maintainability and possible replacement with ifupdownng hasled to discussions about the default network-management tools forDebian "trixie"(Debian 13, which is expected in 2025) and beyond. No route to consensushas been found, yet.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of seven new stable kernels:6.10.10, 6.6.51, 6.1.110, 5.15.167, 5.10.226 5.4.284, and 4.19.322. As usual, they all contain lots ofimportant fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and redis), Fedora (nextcloud, python3.10, python3.13, python3.6, vim, and wolfssl), Mageia (expat, libpcap, and microcode), Oracle (dovecot, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (kernel and krb5), SUSE (389-ds, colord, containerd, curl, expat, glib2, go1.22, go1.23, kernel, libpcap, postgresql16, and runc), and Ubuntu (expat, libxmltok, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-azure, linux-iot, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, python-setuptools, setuptools, tiff, and unbound).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 12, 2024 is available.

The Python community has been roiled, to a certain extent, by an actiontaken bythe steering council (SC): the three-month suspensionof a unnamed-weirdly-Python core developer. Tim Peters is the developerin question, as he has acknowledged,though it could easily be deduced from the SC message. Peters has beeninvolved in theproject from its early days and, among many other things, is the author ofPEP20 ("The Zen ofPython"). The suspension was due to violations of the project's code ofconduct that stem from the discussion around a somewhat controversial setof proposed changes to the bylaws for the Python Software Foundation(PSF) back in mid-June.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds:1.4, dovecot, emacs, and glib2), Fedora (bluez, iwd, libell, linux-firmware, seamonkey, vim, and wireshark), Mageia (apr, libtiff, Nginx, openssl, orc, unbound, webmin, and zziplib), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4), and SUSE (containerd, curl, go1.22, go1.23, gstreamer-plugins-bad, kernel, ntpd-rs, python-Django, and python311).

Version3.4 of the Pandocdocument-conversion tool has been released. Notable changes in thisrelease include a new ANSI output format (for console output), a switch to WeasyPrint as the PDF engine forHTML to PDF conversion, the ability to position captionsabove or below tables and figures, and much more.

CPU scheduling is a challenging job; since it inherently requires makingguesses about what the demands on the system will be in the future, itremains reliant on heuristics, despite ongoing efforts to remove them.Some of those heuristics take special note of tasks that are (or appear tobe) waiting for fast I/O operations. There is some unhappiness, though,with how this factor is used, leading to a couple of patches taking ratherdifferent approaches to improve the situation.

Version 1.0of the Radicle development platform has been released.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti), Fedora (aardvark-dns, expat, and firefox), Mageia (ffmpeg, ntfs-3g, and vim), Oracle (emacs, glib2, java-11-openjdk, and qt5-qtbase), Red Hat (emacs, python-setuptools, python3.11, python3.11-setuptools, python3.12-setuptools, python3.9, and python39:3.9), Slackware (netatalk), SUSE (buildah, expat, java-1_8_0-ibm, kanidm, kernel, and postgresql16), and Ubuntu (netty, php7.0, php7.2, tiff, and webkit2gtk).

Version0.9.0 of Redox OS,an open-source, Unix-like operating system written inRust, has been released. Notable changes in this release includeperformance and stability improvements, better management of physicaland virtual memory, bootloader improvements, and more. It also bringssupport for RustPython, Perl 5, Simple HTTP Server, the addition ofseveral applications including GNU Nano, Helix, and the COSMICFiles, Editor, and Terminal applications. See the changelogsection of the announcement for a full list of changes in the release.

Many projects struggle with attracting and retaining contributors; Debianis no different in that regard. At DebConf24, Carlos Henrique LimaMelara and Lucas Kanashiro gave a presentation about efforts that theBrazilian Debian community has made to increase participation. Their ideasand the lessonslearned can be applied more widely, both for other Debian communities andfor other projects.

Jacob Adams wanders intothe kernel's hibernation code:

Security updates have been issued by Debian (amanda, aom, bluez, python-jwcrypto, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, and thunderbird), Red Hat (bubblewrap and flatpak, containernetworking-plugins, flatpak, and runc), Slackware (python3), SUSE (apache2, bubblewrap and flatpak, postgresql16, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (thunderbird).

Linus has released 6.11-rc7 for testing.

The6.10.9,6.6.50, and6.1.109stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set ofimportant fixes.

Code review is in high demand, and short supply, for most open-source projects.Reviewer time is precious, so any tool that can lighten the load is worth exploring.That is why Jesse Brandeburg and Kamel Ayari decided to test whethertools like ChatGPT could review patches to provide quick feedback tocontributors about common problems. In atalk at the Netdev0x18 conference this July, Brandeburg provided an overview of anexperiment using machine learning to review emails containing patchessent to the netdevmailing list. Large-language models (LLMs) will not be replacing human reviewers anytimesoon, but they may be a useful addition to help humans focus on deeperreviews instead of simple rule violations.

The NGINX team has announcedthat official NGINX open-source development has moved away fromMercurial to GitHub, andthe project will now be taking contributionsin the form of pull requests:

Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the Linux man pages for thelast four years, has announcedthat he will have to stop that work.

Work on realtime preemption for the Linux kernel got its start almost exactly 20years ago(though it had its roots in earlier work, of course). It is fair to saythat finishing that job has taken a bit longer than anybody involved wouldhave expected. Now, though, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has posted a briefpatch series making it possible to enable realtime preemption in themainline kernel on three architectures.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bubblewrap, flatpak), Debian (libxml2), Fedora (lua-mpack, mingw-python3, python-django, python-django4.2, python3.11, python3.13, and python3.9), Oracle (bubblewrap, flatpak), Red Hat (fence-agents, python-urllib3, resource-agents, and wget), Slackware (expat and mozilla), SUSE (buildah, chromium, firefox, gradle, java-1_8_0-ibm, kubernetes1.26, postgresql16, python-Django, python312-pip, and systemd), and Ubuntu (python-aiohttp).

Version1.81.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include thestabilization of the Error trait in core, some new sortalgorithms, some linting improvements, and more.

OpenSnitch is an"interactive application firewall". Like other firewalls, it uses aseries of rules to decide what network traffic should be permitted. Unlikemany other firewalls, though, OpenSnitch does not ask the user to create a list of rulesahead of time. Instead, the list of rules can be built upincrementally as applications make connections - and the user can peruse boththe rules that have built up over time, and statistics on the connections thathave been attempted.

Version 4.21.0 of the Samba Windows interoperability suite has beenreleased. Changes include some authentication hardening, a number of LDAPimprovements, per-user and per-group veto and hide files, group-managedservice accounts, and quite a bit more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bubblewrap and flatpak, containernetworking-plugins, fence-agents, ghostscript, krb5, orc, podman, python3.11, python3.9, resource-agents, runc, and wget), Debian (chromium, cinder, glance, gnutls28, nova, nsis, python-oslo.utils, ruby-sinatra, and setuptools), Fedora (kernel), Oracle (bubblewrap and flatpak, buildah, containernetworking-plugins, fence-agents, ghostscript, gvisor-tap-vsock, kernel, krb5, libndp, nodejs:18, orc, podman, postgresql, python-urllib3, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, runc, skopeo, and wget), SUSE (hdf5, netcdf, trilinos), and Ubuntu (firefox, imagemagick, ironic, openssl, python-django, vim, and znc).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 5, 2024 is available.

The call for candidateshas gone out for the 2024 election of members of the Linux FoundationTechnical Advisory Board:

Version 4.0 of the Tellico collection-managementsoftware has been released. This is the first release to use theKDEFrameworks6 and Qt6 libraries, with a fallbackavailable for Frameworks5 and Qt5. Other notable changes in 4.0include importing video collections from file metadata and correctlyimporting multi-disc album data from Discogs, MusicBrainz, and iTunes. Usersof prior versions are advised to make a backup of their data before upgrading.

Much of the early Rust code for the kernel has taken the form ofreimplementations of existing drivers as a proof of concept. One project,though, is entirely new: the driver for Apple GPUs written by Asahi Lina.This driver has shipped with AsahiLinux for some time and, by many accounts, is stable, usable, and ashining example of how Rust can be used in a complex kernel subsystem.That driver remains outside of the mainline kernel, though, and mergingcurrently looks like a distant prospect. The reasons for that state ofaffairs highlight some of the difficulties inherent in integrating a newlanguage (and its associated development style) into the Linux kernel.

The 6.10.8, 6.6.49, 6.1.108, 5.15.166, 5.10.225, 5.4.283, and 4.19.321 stable kernel updates have allbeen released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout thetree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, gvisor-tap-vsock, nodejs:18, python-urllib3, and skopeo), Debian (firefox-esr and openssl), Fedora (apr and seamonkey), Red Hat (podman), Slackware (mozilla and seamonkey), SUSE (bubblewrap and flatpak, buildah, docker, dovecot23, ffmpeg, frr, go1.21-openssl, graphviz, java-1_8_0-openj9, kubernetes1.26, kubernetes1.27, kubernetes1.28, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-3, perl-DBI, python-aiohttp, python-Django, python-WebOb, thunderbird, tiff, ucode-intel, unbound, webkit2gtk3, and xen), and Ubuntu (drupal7 and twisted).

Version130.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Notable in thisrelease is the addition of a Firefox Labs tab in FirefoxSettings. This allows users to easily enable experimental features,such as the ability to translate selected text portions to differentlanguages after a full-page translation, and addan AI chatbot to the sidebar. Firefox 130 also addresses severalsecurity issues, adds 11 new languages to its translation support,and more.

One of the joys of writing about technology is the opportunity tocover interesting talks on opensource and freesoftware topics. Oneof the pains is creating transcriptions of said talks, or continuallyreferring back to a recording, to be able to write aboutthem. Speech Note is anopen-source application that uses machine-learning models, running locally, totranslate speech to text and take the pain out of transcription. Italso handles text to speech, and language translations. While notperfect, its transcriptions are better than one might expect, even whenhandling jargon, accents, and less-than-perfect audio.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python3.12), Debian (calibre, exfatprogs, frr, git, libtommath, nbconvert, ruby-nokogiri, ruby-tzinfo, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (flatpak, lua-mpack, and python3.12), Red Hat (389-ds-base, 389-ds:1.4, buildah, fence-agents, gvisor-tap-vsock, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, orc, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, python-urllib3, python3.12, and skopeo), SUSE (389-ds, bubblewrap and flatpak, cacti, cacti-spine, curl, glib2, kernel-firmware, libqt5-qt3d, libqt5-qtquick3d, opera, python39, qemu, unbound, xen, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, linux-raspi-5.4, and python-webob).

At this year's GUADEC in Denver, Colorado, Behdad Esfahbod and Matthias Clasenpresented a two-part talk on a topic that's deeply important to desktopenvironments: fonts. Esfahbod covered advances in fonttechnology that are making their way to becoming standards, and Clasen brieflydiscussed improvements in GTK text rendering. The talk presented somefascinating insights into the problems around accurately renderingwriting systems on the desktop, and where font technologies may begoing in the near future.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (postgresql:16), Debian (dovecot, pymatgen, ruby2.7, systemd, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (microcode_ctl, python3.11, vim, and xen), Oracle (kernel, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Slackware (libpcap), SUSE (cacti, cacti-spine, python-Django, and trivy), and Ubuntu (dovecot).

Linus has released 6.11-rc6 for testing."Things look pretty normal, although we have perhaps unusually manyfilesystem fixes here, spread out over smb, xfs, bcachefs and netfs."

Reading an established open-source project's developer mailing listmay leave new contributors wishing they had a decoder ring. GregSabino Mullane has written up a valuable explainerfor those new to the PostgreSQL hackers (pgsql-hackers)mailing list that may also be useful for decoding other lists as well:

Here is a piece of advice for anybody wanting an easy and frustration-freelife: do not run your own email system. While there are numerous advantages tokeeping some control over your communications, there is also a long list ofthings that can go wrong. A recent failure of spam filtering on the LWNemail system illustrated one of those ways, as well as shining a light onhow even a seemingly independent email system is tied to other servicesacross the net.

Back in 2021, the ElasticSearch search engine and Kibana visualizationplatform were relicensed under the non-freeServer Side Public License (SSPL). Now, Elastic (the company owning thoseprojects) has announcedthat those projects will also be distributable under the Affero GPL license.

Dave Airlie makesan analogy between the stages of road building and those of adding Rustto the Linux kernel.

The venerable AnandTech site has announcedits closing after 27years of technology-industry coverage.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libvpx, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Debian (chromium and ghostscript), Fedora (python3.13), and SUSE (chromium and podman).

The KDE project plans to directlyask for donations in the Plasma desktop starting with version6.2. According to thisblog post by Nate Graham, users will see asystem notification once per year (in December) asking for adonation to the non-profit KDEe.V.:

Version 5.0.0 of GNUScreen hasbeen released. Notable changes in this release includenew commands for authentication, input into multiple windows at thesame time, and to turn on/off truecolor support.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.10.7, 6.6.48, and 6.1.107 stable kernels. They all containimportant fixes throughout the kernel tree, as is the norm.

Plasma Mobile is an open-sourceuser interface for mobile devices, developed by the KDE community. It'sbuilt on the same foundations as Plasma Desktop, including KDE Frameworks and the KWin windowmanager. Much like its desktop counterpart, Plasma Mobile caters toadvanced users by offering extensive customizability. It is offered as anoption on phones with various mobile Linuxdistributions.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind and bind-dyndb-ldap and postgresql:16), Fedora (less and python3.6), Mageia (nodejs & yarnpkg), Oracle (libvpx and postgresql:16), Red Hat (edk2, git, kernel, openldap, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, python3, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), SUSE (apache2, python-setuptools, and python3-setuptools), and Ubuntu (linux-oracle).

Wedson Almeida Filho, one of the key developers driving the Rust-for-Linux project, has retired from theproject.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 29, 2024 is available.