Security updates have been issued by Debian (mediawiki and node-tough-cookie), Red Hat (bind, kernel, kpatch-patch, and python38:3.8, python38-devel:3.8), SUSE (kernel, nextcloud-desktop, and python-tornado), and Ubuntu (dwarves-dfsg and thunderbird).
Linus Torvalds released6.5-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle onJuly9. By that point, 11,730 non-merge changesets had been pulledinto the mainline for 6.5; over 7,700 of those were pulled afterthe first-half merge-window summary waswritten. The second half of the merge window saw a lot of code coming intothe mainline and a long list of significant changes.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, fusiondirectory, ocsinventory-server, php-cas, and thunderbird), Fedora (dav1d, perl-CPAN, and yt-dlp), Red Hat (python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (prometheus-ha_cluster_exporter and prometheus-sap_host_exporter), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, linux-azure, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, and ruby-doorkeeper).
After an initial foray into the ways that open-source software has failedto live up to its early hype,this DigitalAntiquarian article covers the history of rogue-like games in greatdetail.
Over the years, the kernel has developed a number of deferred-executionmechanisms to take care of work that cannot be done immediately. For many(or most) needs, the workqueuesubsystem is the tool that developers reach for first. Workqueuestook their current form over a dozen yearsago, but that does not mean that there are not improvements to be made.Two sets of patches from Tejun Heo show the pressures being felt by theworkqueue subsystem and the solutions that are being tried - with varyingdegrees of success.
The Fedora project is considering aFedora40 change proposal to add limited, opt-out telemetry to theworkstation edition. The proposal is detailed; it is clear that thedevelopers involved understand that this will be a hard sell in thatcommunity.
In the first of two combined BPF and filesystem sessions at the2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Hou Tao introduced his BPF iteratorsfor filesystem information. Iterators forBPF are a relatively recent addition to the BPF landscape; they helpBPF programs step through kernel data structures in a loop-like manner, butwithout running afoul of the BPF verifier, which is notoriously hard toconvince about loops.
The transition to folios has transformedthe memory-management subsystem in a number of ways, but has also resultedin a lot of code churn that has not been welcomed by all developers. Asthis work proceeds, though, some of the benefits from it are beginning tobecome clear. One example may well be in the handling of anonymous memory,as can be seen in a pair of patch sets from Ryan Roberts.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (golang-yaml.v2, kernel, and mediawiki), Fedora (kernel and picocli), SUSE (bind and python-sqlparse), and Ubuntu (cpdb-libs).
The i_versionfield in structinodeis meant to track changes to the data or metadata of a file. There aresome problems with the way thati_version is being handled in the kernel, so Jeff Layton led a filesystem session at the2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,Memory-Management and BPF Summit to discuss them and what to doabout them. For the most part, there are solutions in the works that willresolve most of the larger issues.
Termux is an Android app thatprovides a Linux environment and terminal emulator for such devices. Mostcommand-line software can be used quite easily with Termux, and GUI software can be run by installing a few extra apps. It is an excellentoption for Android users who want to run Linux software occasionally on adevice more portable than a laptop but do not want to use a dedicated Linuxphone due to the cost or limitations of such devices.
Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier has been a part of the Linux community for decades;he is now using that experience to write a series on "Red Hat and the CloneWars". The first two episodes were RedHat and the Clone Wars and Ahistory of the early 2000s Linux landscape; the latest is Thedawn of CentOS:
Version115 of the Firefox browser has been released. New features includesupport for hardware video decoding on Intel GPUs on Linux and a new"close" option on the tab-manager dropdown. This release is also the endof the line for Windows7 and8 support, and for macOS 10.12,10.13, and 10.14 support as well.
Chuck Lever led a filesystem session at the2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,Memory-Management and BPF Summit on the Linux NFS server, which is alsoknown as NFSD. He wanted to talk about converting the network filesystemto use iomap; that kind ofconversionwas the topic of the previous session atthe summit. Beyond that, he wanted to discuss using folios, which has beena frequent topic at recent LSFMM+BPF gatherings, including this year.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ghostscript), Fedora (apache-ivy, chromium, golang-github-schollz-croc, golang-github-schollz-mnemonicode, and webkitgtk), SUSE (amazon-ecs-init, dnsdist, libcap, python-tornado, terraform, and xmltooling), and Ubuntu (imagemagick, openldap, php7.4, php8.1, and screen).
The C language is expressive in many ways, but it still does not have waysto express many of the relationships between fields in a data structure.That gap can be at least partially filled, though, if one is willing tocreate and use non-standard extensions. The adoption of of thoseextensions, in the form of the __counted_by() macro, has beenmerged for the 6.5 kernel release, even though the compiler feature itdepends on has not yet been finalized.
Version 5.38.0 of the Perl language is out. "Perl 5.38.0 representsapproximately 12 months of development since Perl 5.36.0 and containsapproximately 290,000 lines of changes across 1,500 files from 100authors." Significant changes include a new class feature,Unicode 15.0 support, a new API for hooking into functions, and more; seethe5.38.0 perldelta page for details.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (cups, gst-plugins-bad1.0, gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, python3.7, and yajl), Fedora (chromium, kubernetes, pcs, and webkitgtk), Scientific Linux (open-vm-tools), SUSE (iniparser, keepass, libvirt, prometheus-ha_cluster_exporter, prometheus-sap_host_exporter, rekor, terraform-provider-aws, terraform-provider-helm, and terraform-provider-null), and Ubuntu (python-reportlab and vim).
The first days of the 6.5 merge window have been a bit calmer than usual,with "only" 4,000 non-merge changesets having been pulled into the mainlinerepository. Those changesets include a fair amount of significant work,though. Read on for LWN's summary of the first set of changes merged forthe next major kernel release.
The Emacs editor is not tied to the Linux kernel; indeed, it was createdsome years before Linux existed. The Emacs code base is intended to beportable, and the editor runs, with varying levels of support, on a widevariety of systems. Recently, an energetic developer has worked to extendthe set of supported systems to Android; the result is a working port, butwhether that port will be accepted into the Emacs mainline is the topic ofongoing conversation.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and maradns), SUSE (iniparser, kubernetes1.23, python-reportlab, and python-sqlparse), and Ubuntu (accountsservice and linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon).
JupyterLab is aweb-based development environment widely used by data scientists,engineers, and educators for data visualization, data analysis,prototyping, and interactive learning materials. The Jupyter community has recently announced therelease of JupyterLab4.0, introducing lots of new features and performanceimprovements to enhance its capabilities both in research and educationalsettings.
A discussion that largely centered around the documentation ofiomap, which provides a block-mapping interface for modern filesystems,was led by Luis Chamberlain at the2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,Memory-Management and BPF Summit. There is an ongoing process ofconverting filesystems to use iomap, in order to leave buffer heads behind and to better support folios, sothe intent was to get feedback on the documentation from developers who areworking on those conversions. One of the concrete outcomes of the sessionwas a plan to move that documentation from its current location on theKernelNewbies wiki intothe kernel documentation.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (c-ares and libx11), Fedora (chromium and kubernetes), Red Hat (python3 and python38:3.8, python38-devel:3.8), and SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, kernel, kubernetes1.24, libvirt, nodejs16, openssl-1_1, and webkit2gtk3).
The 6.4 kernel was releasedon June25 after a nine-week development cycle. By that point, 14,835non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline kernel, a slightincrease from 6.3 (14,424 changesets) but still lower than many otherdevelopment cycles. As usual, LWN has taken a look at those changesets,who contributed them, and what the most active developers were up to.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9 and owslib), Fedora (dav1d, dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, mingw-dbus, vim, and wabt), and SUSE (cloud-init and golang-github-vpenso-prometheus_slurm_exporter).
Over on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence Bradley M. Kuhn analyzes the recent changes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source availability in light of the GPL. It contains some interesting information about two alleged GPL violations that came about because the company's business model is structured in a way that brings it too close to non-compliance with the license, he said:
The final day of the2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem,Memory-Management and BPF Summit featured three separate sessions led byLuis Chamberlain (he also led a plenary onday two); the first of those was a filesystem session on the status of thekthread-freezer-removal effort. The kthread freezer is meant to helpfilesystems freeze their state in order tosuspend or hibernate the system, but since at least2015, the freezer has been targeted for removal. Thingsdid not change much a year later, nor by LSFMM in2018 when Chamberlain had picked up Jiri Kosina's removaleffort; this year, Chamberlain was back to try to push things along.
The fifth conference on PowerManagement and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel (abbreviated "OSPM") washeld on April17 to19 in Ancona, Italy. LWN was not there,unfortunately, but the attendees of the event have gotten together to writeup summaries of the discussions that took place and LWN has the privilegeof being able to publish them. Reports from the third and final day of theevent appear below.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk, lua5.3, and trafficserver), Fedora (tang and trafficserver), Oracle (.NET 7.0, c-ares, firefox, openssl, postgresql, python3, texlive, and thunderbird), Red Hat (python27:2.7 and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Scientific Linux (c-ares), Slackware (cups), SUSE (cups, dav1d, google-cloud-sap-agent, java-1_8_0-openjdk, libX11, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, openvswitch, and python-sqlparse), and Ubuntu (cups, dotnet6, dotnet7, and openssl).
The AlmaLinux organization has posted a messagedescribing the impact of Red Hat's decision to stop releasing the source tothe RHEL distribution and how AlmaLinux will respond.
The quest to enable limited use of BPF features in unprivileged processescontinues. In the previous episode, anattempt to use authoritative Linux security module (LSM) hooks for thispurpose was strongly rejected by the LSM developers. BPF developer AndriiNakryiko has now returned with a new mechanism based on aprivilege-conveying token. That approach, too, has run into someresistance, but a solution for the strongest concerns might be in sight.
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