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."
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).
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."
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.
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.
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.
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).
Thispost on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux blog describes the discovery andrepair of the "Badlock" vulnerability. One begins to understand a littlebetter why it took as long as it did. "The code was rewritten; inMarch 2016 the changes needed to fix all eight CVEs amounted to about 200individual patches against a development version of Samba, with about halfof those responsible for fixing CVE-2015-5370. When backported to previousstable Samba versions, they needed additional hundred patches. To oldestsupported Samba version — about four hundred patches. What started as anindividual snowflake became an avalanche but it wasn’t finishedyet."
It appears to be widely accepted that the Linux desktop has achievedlimited success at best, while the Linux palmtop — in the form ofAndroid — has been wildly successful. The two classes of systems aregenerally thought of as being quite different, but it is worth rememberingthat the handsets we carry now have more computing power than the desktopsystems we were using in the recent past. Given the right peripherals, anAndroid handset should be more than capable of providing a reasonabledesktop experience. The Marudistribution is an experiment intended to prove that point by turning asmartphone device into a portable Debian desktop.
The 4.6-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing."So there really isn't anything particularly interesting here. Justlike I like it in the rc series. Let's hope it stays that way."
On his blog, Sven Brauch has some suggestions on how to use NumPy to process scientific data and how to avoid some pitfalls that will ruin its performance. "In general, copying data is cheap. But if your program simulates 25 million particles, each having a float64 location in 3d, you already have 8*3*25e6 = 600 MB of data. Thus, if you write r = r + v*dt, you will copy 1.2 GB of data around in memory: once 600 MB to calculate v*dt, and again to calculate r+(v*dt), and only then the result is written back to r. This can really become a major bottleneck if you aren’t careful. Fortunately, it is usually easy to circumvent; instead of writing r = r+dv, write r += dv. Instead of a = 3*a + b, write a *= 3; a+= b. This avoids the copying completely. For calculating v*dt and adding it to r, the situation is a bit more tricky; one good idea is to just have the unit of v be such that you don’t need to multiply by dt. If that is not possible, it might even be worth it to keep a copy of v which is multiplied by dt already, and update that whenever you update v. This is advantageous if only few v values change per step of your simulation.I would not recommend writing it like this everywhere though, it’s often not worth the loss in readability; just for really large arrays and when the code is executed frequently."
Over at the Scylla blog, Glauber Costa looks at why a high-performance datastore application might want to do its own I/O scheduling. "If one is using a threaded approach for managing I/O, a thread can be assigned to a different priority group by tools such as ionice. However, ionice only allows us to choose between general concepts like real-time, best-effort and idle. And while Linux will try to preserve fairness among the different actors, that doesn’t allow any fine tuning to take place. Dividing bandwidth among users is a common task in network processing, but it is usually not possible with disk I/O without resorting to infrastructure like cgroups.More importantly, modern designs like the Seastar framework used by Scylla to build its infrastructure may stay away from threads in favor of a thread-per-core design in the search for better scalability. In the light of these considerations, can a userspace application like Scylla somehow guarantee that all actors are served according to the priorities we would want them to obey?"
Over at the Freedom to Tinker blog, guest poster Vitaly Shmatikov, who is a professor at Cornell Tech, writes about his study [PDF] of whatURL shortening means for the security and privacy of cloud services."TL;DR: short URLs produced by bit.ly, goo.gl, and similar services are so short that they can be scanned by brute force. Our scan discovered a large number of Microsoft OneDrive accounts with private documents. Many of these accounts are unlocked and allow anyone to inject malware that will be automatically downloaded to users’ devices. We also discovered many driving directions that reveal sensitive information for identifiable individuals, including their visits to specialized medical facilities, prisons, and adult establishments."
CoreOS has announced therelease of its "Ignition" provisioning tool. "At the the most basiclevel, Ignition is a tool for manipulating disks during early boot. Thisincludes partitioning disks, formatting partitions, writing files, andconfiguring users." It runs as the first process — before systemd —to get the system into the proper shape before the ordinary boot processtakes over.
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