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Security updates have been issued by Debian (gerbv), Fedora (webkitgtk), and SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, freeradius-server, multimon-ng, vim, and vlc).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libksba, and mbedtls), Fedora (containerd, curl, firefox, kernel, mod_auth_openidc, and xorg-x11-server), and Mageia (chromium-browser-stable).

Linus has released 6.2-rc1 and closed themerge window for this release. "So it's Christmas Day here, but it's also Sunday afternoon two weeksafter the 6.2 merge window opened. So holidays or not, the kerneldevelopment show must go on."

The kernel project tries hard to avoid duplicating functionality within itscode base; whenever possible, a single subsystem is made to serve all usecases. There is one notable exception to this rule, though: there arethree object-level memory allocators ("slab allocators") in the kernel.The desire to reduce the count has been growing stronger over the years,and some steps have been taken in 6.2 to eliminate the least-lovedallocator — SLOB — in the relatively near future.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-hawk and node-trim-newlines), Fedora (insight, ntfs-3g, and suricata), and SUSE (conmon, helm, kernel, and mbedtls).

Intel's graphical processors have been well supported in the mainline foryears, but it seems that the i915 driver may be approaching the end of itsdevelopment life. Matthew Brost has just posted a newdriver called "Xe" that looks to be (eventually) a replacement fori915:

The wish for a "None-aware" operator (or operators) islongstanding within the Python community. While there is fairlywidespread interest in more easily handling situations where a value needs to betested for being None before being further processed, there ismuch less agreement on how to "spell" such an operator (or construct) andon whether the language truly needs it. But the idea never seems to goaway, with long discussions erupting every year or two—and no resolutionreally in sight.

Version4.2.0 of the Darktable raw photo editor is out. New features include anew display transform module, a pair of new highlight-reconstructionalgorithms, and more; see the announcement and this Libre Artsarticle for more.

Konstantin Ryabitsev has put up ablog entry showing how to use b4 to submit kernel patcheswithout (directly) using email.

The openSUSE News site coverssome highlights from the second prototyperelease of the upcoming SUSE "ALP" distribution.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libksba and linux-5.10), Slackware (mozilla), and SUSE (curl, java-1_8_0-ibm, and sqlite3).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 22, 2022 is available.

Yet another year is coming to a close; that can only mean that the time hascome to indulge in a longstanding LWN tradition: looking back at the predictions we made in January and givingthem the mocking that they richly deserve. Read on to see how thosepredictions went, what was missed, and a look back at the year in general.

Andrew 'bunnie' Huang writes about his workwith Cramium to bring more openness to secure elementchips:

The6.1.1,6.0.15,5.15.85, and5.10.161stable kernel updates have been released. Each contains a relatively smallset of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (xorg-server), Fedora (samba, snakeyaml, thunderbird, xorg-x11-server, and xrdp), Slackware (libksba and sdl), and SUSE (cni, cni-plugins, java-1_7_1-ibm, kernel, openssl-3, and supportutils).

ActivityPub-enabled microblogs are gainingpopularity as a replacement for Twitter, but ActivityPub is for more thanjust microblogging. Many other popular services also have open-sourcealternatives that speak ActivityPub. Proprietary services operated bycommercial interests usually deliberately limit interoperability, but usersof any ActivityPub-enabled service should be able to communicate with eachother, even if they are using different services. This promise ofinteroperability is often limited in practice, though; while ActivityPubspecifies how multiple types of contentcan be published, the kinds of content that can bedisplayed or interacted with vary from project to project.

Version 2.4.0 of the GNU Privacy Guard has been released. "Exactly 25 years ago the very first release of GnuPG was published. Weare pleased to take this opportunity to announce the availability of anew stable GnuPG release: version 2.4.0." Changes in this releaseinclude full support for the key database daemon, some performanceimprovements, a change to AES256 as the default cipher, and much more.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (mujs) and SUSE (kernel and thunderbird).

Linux Mint has announced the release of version 21.1 of the distribution in three editions: Cinnamon (what's new), MATE (what's new), and Xfce (what's new).Mint 21.1 is based on Ubuntu 22.04 and uses kernel version 5.15.

The memfd interface is a bit of a strange and Linux-specific beast; it wasinitially created to support the securepassing of data between cooperating processes on a single system. It hassince gained other roles, but it may still come as a surprise to some tolearn that memory regions created for memfds, unlike almost any other dataarea, have the execute permission bit set. That can facilitate attacks; thispatch set from Jeff Xu proposes an addition to the memfd API to closethat hole.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.0.14, 5.15.84, 5.10.160, and 5.4.228 stable kernels. They contain arelatively small number of important fixes throughout the tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and thunderbird), Fedora (keylime, libarchive, libtasn1, pgadmin4, rubygem-nokogiri, samba, thunderbird, wireshark, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Gentoo (curl, libreoffice, nss, unbound, and virtualbox), Mageia (advancecomp, couchdb, firefox, freerdp, golang, heimdal, kernel, kernel-linus, krb5, leptonica, libetpan, python-slixmpp, thunderbird, and xfce4-settings), Oracle (firefox, nodejs:16, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox and thunderbird), Slackware (samba), SUSE (chromium and kernel), and Ubuntu (linux-oem-5.17).

Version 4.0.0 of the Apache SpamAssassin spam filter has been released.

Version5.0.0 of the OCaml programming language is out.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, libde265, php7.3, and thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, freeradius, freerdp, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (firefox, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, nodejs:16, prometheus-jmx-exporter, and thunderbird), and SUSE (ceph and chromium).

Version 4.18 ofthe Xfce desktop environment has been released.

Once upon a time, Linus Torvalds would try to set a pace of about 1,000changesets pulled into the mainline each day during the early part of themerge window. For 6.2, though, the situation is different; no less than9,278 non-merge changesets were pulled during the first two days. Needlessto say, these commits affect the kernel in numerous ways, even though thereare fewer fundamental changes than were seen in 6.1.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and git), Slackware (mozilla and xorg), SUSE (apache2-mod_wsgi, capnproto, xorg-x11-server, xwayland, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (emacs24, firefox, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-oem-6.0, and xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-18.04, xwayland).

Ted Ts'o, in collaboration with the Linux Foundation Technical AdvisoryBoard, has put together a document called the Linux kernelcontribution maturity model to help companies improve theirparticipation in the kernel development process.

The6.0.13,5.15.83,5.10.159,5.4.227,4.19.269,4.14.302, and4.9.336stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set ofimportant fixes.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 15, 2022 is available.

A report from the syzbotkernel fuzz-testing robot does not usually spawn a vitriolic mailing-list thread, but that is just what happened recently.While the invective is regrettable, the underlying issue is important. Thedispute revolves around how best to report bugs to affected subsystems and, ultimately, how not to waste maintainers' time.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (pngcheck), Fedora (qemu), Mageia (admesh, busybox, emacs, libarchive, netkit-telnet, ruby, rxvt-unicode, and shadowutils), Oracle (bcel and kernel), Red Hat (389-ds-base, bcel, dbus, firefox, grub2, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, thunderbird, and usbguard), Scientific Linux (bcel), SUSE (containerd, firefox, grafana, java-1_8_0-openjdk, libtpms, net-snmp, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (pillow).

Everything Open is,seemingly, the future form of the conference once known as linux.conf.au;see thispage for a discussion of the reasoning behind the change. Theinaugural event will be held March 14 to 16 in Melbourne,Australia, and the call forproposals has gone out now, with a deadline of January 15."Our aim is to create a deeply technical conference where we bringtogether industry leaders and experts on a wide range of subjects."

X.org users running in potentially hostile environments will want to lookinto the xorg-server 21.1.5 release, whichfixes several potentially serious securityvulnerabilities. "All theses issues can lead to local privilegeselevation on systems where the X server is running privileged and remotecode execution for ssh X forwarding sessions".

Version108 of the Firefox browser has been released. The headline featurethis time around appears to be the enabling of import maps bydefault, along with support for theWeb MIDI API and the usual set of security fixes.

Bugzilla project lead Dave Miller has posted a plan for several upcoming releases of the bug-tracking tool. The post starts with: "Surprise! Bugzilla’s not dead yet. :-)". It is, in effect, an update to his August posting to the Bugzilla developers mailing list. In the new post, he outlines the plan for releases of multiple branches, lists specific areas where help is needed, and describes some project infrastructure improvements.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-tar and pngcheck), SUSE (colord, containerd, and tiff), and Ubuntu (containerd, linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-oem-5.17, and vim).

Version 2.39.0of the Git source-code management system is out. "It is comprised of483 non-merge commits since v2.38.0, contributed by 86 people, 31 of whichare new faces". This release seems to mostly offer incrementalimprovements; see the announcement or this GitHubblog post for details.

The 6.1 kernel was releasedon December 11; by the time of this release, 13,942 non-mergechangesets had been pulled into the mainline, growing the kernel by 412,000lines of code. This is thus not the busiest development cycle ever, butneither is it the slowest, and those changesets contained a number offundamental changes. This release will also be the long-term-supportkernel for 2022. Read on for a look at where the work in 6.1 came from.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti, grub2, hsqldb, node-eventsource, and openexr), Fedora (bcel, keylime, rust-capnp, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, xfce4-screenshooter, and xfce4-settings), Oracle (nodejs:18), Scientific Linux (grub2), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (go1.18, go1.19, nautilus, opera, python-slixmpp, and samba), and Ubuntu (python2.7, python3.5, qemu, and squid3).

Version3.0 of the OpenShot video editor is out.

Linus has released the 6.1 kernel; he is preparing for a tricky holiday merge window:

Virtual-memory systems provide a great deal of flexibility in how memorycan be mapped and protected. Unfortunately, memory-management flexibilitycan also be useful to attackers bent on compromising a system. In theOpenBSD world, a new system call is being added to reduce this flexibility;it is, though, a system call that almost no code is expected to use.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (leptonlib), Fedora (woff), Red Hat (grub2), Slackware (emacs), SUSE (busybox, chromium, java-1_8_0-openjdk, netatalk, and rabbitmq-server), and Ubuntu (gcc-5, gccgo-6, glibc, protobuf, and python2.7, python3.10, python3.6, python3.8).

Version 8.2.0 of thePHP language is out.

Each new kernel release fixes a lot of bugs, but each release alsointroduces new bugs of its own. That leads to a fundamentalquestion: is the kernel community fixing bugs more quickly than it is addingthem? The answer is less than obvious but, if it could be found, itwould give an important indication of the long-term future of the kernelcode base. While digging into the kernel's revision history cannot give adefinitive answer to that question, it can provide some hints as to whatthat answer might be.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.0.12,5.15.82, 5.10.158, 5.4.226, 4.19.268, 4.14.301, and 4.9.335 stable kernels. As is the norm, theycontain important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those seriesshould upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dlt-daemon, jqueryui, and virglrenderer), Fedora (firefox, vim, and woff), Oracle (kernel and nodejs:18), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-ibm and redhat-ds:11), Slackware (python3), SUSE (buildah, matio, and osc), and Ubuntu (heimdal and postgresql-9.5).