Version 4.0.0 of the LibreSSL TLS/cryptography stackhas been released. Changes include a cleanup of the MD4 and MD5implementations, removal of unused DSA methods, changes in libtlsprotocol parsing to ignore unsupported TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.0 protocols,and many more internal changes and bug fixes.
Paul McKenney gave a presentation at Kangrejos this year that wasn't (directly)related to Rust. Instead, he spoke about the work he has been doing in concertwith many other contributors on improving the handling of subtle concurrencyproblems in C++.Although he cautioned that his talk was only an overview, and not asubstitute for reading the relevant papers, he hoped that the things the C++community is working on would be of interest to the Rust developers present aswell, and potentially inform future work on the language. McKenney's talk was,as is his style, full of subtle examples of weird multithreaded behavior.Interested readers may wish to refer tohis slides in an attempt to follow along.
Version1.4 of the Inkscapeopen-source vector-graphics editor has been released. Highlights ofthis release include a filter gallery, import for Affinity Designerfiles, internal links in exported PDFs, and more. See the releasenotes for all of the new features. LWN previewed the 1.4 releasein early October.
It is too early to say what the outcome will be in the ongoing fight between Automattic and WPEngine, but the WordPress community at large is already theloser. Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg has been usinghis control of the project, and the WordPress.org infrastructure, topunish WPEngine and remove some dissenting contributors from discussionchannels. Most recently, Mullenweg has instituted a hostile fork of aWPEngine plugin and the forked plugin is replacing the originalvia WordPress updates.
While Debian's "sauce" is not actually all that secret, it is not particularlywell-known either, Samuel Henrique said at the start of his DebConf24 talk. There is a lotof software-engineering effort that has been put in place by thedistribution in order to create and maintain its releases, but "loads ofpeople are not aware" of it. That may be due to the fact that all ofthat isnot really documented anywhere in a central location that he can just pointsomeone to. Recognizing that is what led him to give the talk;hopefully it will be a "first step toward" helping solve the problem.
At Kangrejos, Gary Guo wanted to discuss three problems with the wayRust and C code in the kernel interact: mismatched types, too many type casts,and the overhead of helper functions. To fix the first two problems, Guo proposedchanging the way the kernel maps C types into Rust types. The last problem was abit trickier, but he has a clever workaround for that, based on trickingthe compiler into inlining the helper functions across language boundaries.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 6.0, .NET 8.0, and openssl), Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (php, quictls, and vim), Red Hat (buildah, container-tools:rhel8, containernetworking-plugins, firefox, podman, skopeo, and tomcat), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (apache-commons-io, kernel, and xen), and Ubuntu (golang-1.17, libgsf, and linux-aws-6.8, linux-oracle-6.8).
Version24.10 of the Ubuntu distribution is out. This release includes GNOME47, Linux 6.11,security enhancements for managing Personal Package Archives (PPAs),experimental security controls for Snap packages, and more.
At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit, it was generally agreed that the Rust experiment wouldcontinue, and that the path was clear for more Rust code to enter thekernel. But the high-level view taken at such gatherings cannot alwaysaccount for the difficult details that will inevitably arise as the Rustwork proceeds. A recent discussion on the nouveau mailing list may haveescaped the notice of many, but it highlights some of the problems thatwill have to be worked out as important functionality written in Rust headstoward the mainline.
Mozilla has released Firefox versions 131.0.2, ESR 128.3.1, and ESR115.16.1. These updates address asevere, remotely exploitable code-execution vulnerability that isevidently already being exploited. Updating to a fixed release seems likea wise thing to do.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.11.3, 6.10.14, 6.6.55, and 6.6.56 stable kernels. The 6.6.56 releasefixes a problem with building perf in 6.6.55; "If you do not use theperf tool in the 6.6.y tree, there is no need to upgrade.". Meanwhile,6.10.14 is the last of the 6.10.y series, so users should now be moving to6.11.y. Other than 6.6.56, they contain the usual long list of importantfixes throughout the kernel tree.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (firefox, koji, unbound, webkit2gtk4.0, and xen), Red Hat (glibc, net-snmp, and tomcat), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (apache-commons-io, buildah, cups-filters, liboath-devel, libreoffice, libunbound8, podman, and redis), and Ubuntu (cups-browsed, cups-filters, edk2, linux-raspi-5.4, and oath-toolkit).
Bindgen is a widely used tool that automatically generates Rust bindings from Cheaders. TheRust-for-Linux project uses it to create some ofthe bindings between Rust code and the rest of the kernel. John Baublitzpresented at Kangrejos about the improvements that he has made to the tool inorder to make the generated bindings easier to use, including improved supportfor macros, bitfields, and enums.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, mod_jk, and thunderbird), Debian (apache2 and firefox-esr), Fedora (crosswords, logiops, p7zip, and perl-App-cpanminus), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, firefox, git, kernel, kernel-rt, openssl, and thunderbird), SUSE (buildah, json-lib, kernel, Mesa, mozjs78, pgadmin4, podman, podofo, qatlib, redis7, roundcubemail, rusty_v8, and seamonkey), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet8, nginx, and ruby-webrick).
In the early days of open source, it was a struggle to get companiesto accept the concept and trust its development model.Now, companies have few qualms about using it, but do tend to take open source andthose who maintain it for granted. The struggle now is to find waysto compensate producers of the software, sustain the opensourcecommons, and avoid burning out maintainers. The Open Source Pledge project isan effort to persuade companies to pay maintainers by making it a socialnorm. On October8, the project is launching a marketing campaign to raiseawareness and try to get a larger conversation started around payingmaintainers.
Alice Ryhl has been working to enabletracepoints - which are widely usedthroughout the kernel - to be seamlessly placed in Rust code as well. She spokeabout her approach at Kangrejos. Herpatch setenables efficient use of statictracepoints, but supporting dynamic tracepoints will take some additional effort.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel), Fedora (webkitgtk), Mageia (cups), Oracle (e2fsprogs, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (buildah, container-tools:rhel8, containernetworking-plugins, git-lfs, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, grafana-pcp, podman, and skopeo), SUSE (Mesa, mozjs115, podofo, and redis7), and Ubuntu (cups and cups-filters).
OpenBSD7.6 has been released. Notable newfeatures include work to improve suspend/resume on modern hardware,support for the arm64 Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite laptops, as well as manyimprovements in hardware support and driver bug fixes.
The recent WordPresscontroversy is not the first time there's been tension between theWordPress community, the interests of Automattic as a business, and MattMullenweg's leadership as WordPress's benevolent dictator forlife (BDFL). In particular, Mullenweg's focus on pushing WordPress to use a new"editing experience" called Gutenberg caused significantfriction-and led to the ClassicPress fork. Users whowant to preserve the "classic" WordPress experience without strayingtoo far from the WordPress fold may want to look into ClassicPress.
Version 3.13 of the Python programming language has been released. The"What's NewIn Python 3.13" page has a summary of all the new features andchanges. Highlights of the release include a basic JIT compiler,experimental support for free-threading, and muchmore. See the changelogfor even more details.
The core of the Android operating system, as represented by the Android Open Source Project (AOSP),can only be considered one of the most successful open-source initiativesever created; its user count is measured in the billions. But few wouldconsider it to be a truly community-oriented project. At the 2024 Linux Plumbers Conference, Chris Simmondsasked why the AOSP community is so hard to find, and what might be doneabout the situation.
Version 2.47.0 of the Gitsource-code management system has been released. The changes include along list of incremental improvements; see the announcement and thisGitHub blog post for details.
Version 4.20 ofthe RPM Package Manager (RPM) has been released. Major changes in thisrelease include a new plugin to prevent filesystem and network accessby scriptlets, the BuildSystem directive for declaring thebuild system to be used by packaged software, and more. LWN covered the development ofRPM 4.20 in September.
Akamaireleased a report pointing out that therecently-reported CUPS vulnerability(original disclosure)could be used to drive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks as well. Even if an attacker cannot gain remote control over a computer, they can still cause it to fetch a URL of their choice - potentially getting free DDoS amplification.
Rust has a plethora of smart-pointer types, including reference-countedpointers, which have special support in the compiler to make themeasier to use. The Rust-for-Linux project would like to reap those same benefitsfor its smart pointers, which need to be written by hand to conform totheLinux kernelmemory model. Xiangfei Dingpresented at Kangrejos about the work to enable customsmart pointers to function the same as built-in smart pointers.
The SUSE Security Team Blog has a detailedreport on its discovery of a privilege escalation in theoath-toolkit,which provides libraries and utilities for managing one-time password(OTP) authentication.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, golang, linux-firmware, and thunderbird), Debian (kernel and zabbix), Fedora (firefox, pgadmin4, and php), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, cjson, hostapd and wpa_supplicant, and openjpeg2), Oracle (firefox, flatpak, and go-toolset:ol8), Red Hat (cups-filters, firefox, grafana, linux-firmware, python3, python3.11, and python3.9), SUSE (expat, firefox, libpcap, and opensc), and Ubuntu (freeradius, imagemagick, and unzip).
Cameras were never the simplest of devices for Linux to support; they havea wide range of operating parameters and can generate high rates of data.In recent years, though, they have become increasingly complex, stressingthe ability of the kernel's mediasubsystem to manage them. At the 2024 Linux Plumbers Conference, developers fromthat subsystem and beyond gathered to discuss the state of affairs and howcomplex camera devices should be supported in the future.
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cups-filters), Debian (chromium and php8.2), Fedora (firefox), Oracle (cups-filters, flatpak, kernel, krb5, oVirt 4.5 ovirt-engine, and python-urllib3), Red Hat (cups-filters, firefox, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, and thunderbird), SUSE (postgresql16), and Ubuntu (gnome-shell and linux-azure-fde-5.15).
The open-source vector-graphics editor, Inkscape, is expected to release version1.4in October. The release represents an evolutionary step for the program, whichbrings new features, user-interface improvements, new and improvedfile-format support, and important changes to the code base. The changes inthis release should improve the user experience for both casual andprofessional designers, and make Inkscape more compatible with proprietaryvector-graphics software, including Adobe Illustrator and AffinityDesigner.
BPF Type Format (BTF),BPF's debugging information format, has undergone rapid evolution to matchthe evolving needs of BPF programs. Jose Marchesi spoke at Kangrejos about someof that work - and how it could impact Rust, specifically. He discussed debuginformation, kernel-specific relocations, and the planned changes to kernelstack unwinding. Each of these will require some amount of work to fullysupport in Rust, but preliminary signs look promising.
Version 7.1 ofthe FFmpeg audio/video toolkit has been released. Important changes inthis release include the VVC decoder reaching stable status, andinclusion of support for MV-HEVC decoding (which is generated byrecent phones and VR headsets), as well as support for Vulkan encodingwith H264 and HEVC. See the announcement and changelogfor full details.
Version131.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include theability to temporarily grant permissions to sites and a preview that popsup when hovering over tabs.
One concern that has often been expressed about the Rust language is thatthere is only one compiler for it. That makes it hard to say what thestandard version of the language is and restricts the architectures thatcan be targeted by Rust code to those that the available compiler supports.Adding a Rust frontend to GCC would do much to address those concerns; atthe 2024 GNU ToolsCauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry gave an update on the state of thatwork and what its objectives are.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (debian-security-support, nghttp2, and sqlite3), Oracle (cups-filters, kernel, and osbuild-composer), SUSE (openssl-3), and Ubuntu (bubblewrap, flatpak and python2.7, python3.5).
Tathagata Roy has been working to make theCoccinelle tool that is used (among other things)to automate the refactoring of C code work on Rustcode as well. Roy gave apresentation at Kangrejos about that work,including the creative approaches necessary to work with Rust's more complicatedcontrol flow and syntax.
Linus Torvalds released6.12-rc1 and closed the 6.12 merge window on September29; at thatpoint, 11,260 non-merge change sets had been pulled into the mainline forthe 6.12 release. That is the lowest number of merge-window changes since5.17-rc1 in January 2022, which brought in 11,068 changesets. Nonetheless,6.12 brings a number of interesting changes, many of which were included inthe roughly 4,500 changes merged since thesummary of the first half of the 6.12 merge window was written.
WordPress is the world's mostpopular opensource blogging and contentmanagement platform. In its20plus years of existence, WordPress has been something of a posterchild for open source, similar to Linux and Firefox. It introduced theconcept of open source to millions of bloggers, smallbusiness owners,and others who have deployed WordPress to support their webpublishingneeds. Unfortunately, it is now in the spotlight due to an increasinglyugly dispute between two companies, Automattic and WPEngine, that has spilled over intothe WordPress community.
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