LWN.net

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 16, 2020 is available.

LWN recently covered the effort within theLibreOffice project to find ways to support the companies doing the bulk ofthe development work. The project has now posted arevised marketing plan [PDF] with a number of changes, including theremoval of the "personal edition" name. Regarding LibreOffice Online:"Following our normal development process, the Ecosystem will releasetheir own versions in their own timing, allowing some features to reachtheir Enterprise versions before they are subsequently shipped in TDF builds(this allows the Ecosystem to positively differentiate by contributing newfeatures & functionality)".

The OMG! Ubuntu! site reportsthat the Debian "popularity contest" application is being removed fromUbuntu. "But with Snaps, Flatpaks, PPAs and other avenues givingdevelopers more direct ways to market to users (not to mention moreaccurate numbers on how many people use their software) the relative meritsof 'what's popular in the repos' is …Well, a touch moot."

Lua version 5.4 was released at theend of June; it is the fifteenth major version of the lightweight scriptinglanguage since its creation in 1993. New in 5.4 isa generationalmode for the garbage collector, which performs better for programs withlots of short-lived allocations. The language now supports "attributes" onlocal variables, allowing developers to mark variables as constant(const) or resources as closeable (close). There werealso significant performance improvements over 5.3 along with a host ofminor changes.

The openSUSE board troubles that LWN reportedon in March have continued to simmer, and the promised election for anempty seat has not yet been held. During this time, instead, the project hasvoted on a petition to declare a lack of confidence in the board as awhole, a result that would have forced the election of an entirely newboard. In the end, the number of votes fell far short of the numberrequired, and the existing board will move forward with the election plan.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dbus), Debian (python3.5), Fedora (podofo and roundcubemail), Oracle (dbus, dovecot, jbig2dec, kernel, nodejs:10, nodejs:12, sane-backends, and thunderbird), Red Hat (.NET Core and kernel), SUSE (ansible, ansible1, ardana-ansible, ardana-cluster, ardana-freezer, ardana-input-model, ardana-logging, ardana-mq, ardana-neutron, ardana-octavia, ardana-osconfig, caasp-openstack-heat-templates, crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, documentation-suse-openstack-cloud, grafana, kibana, openstack-dashboard, openstack-dashboard-theme-HPE, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-keystone, openstack-monasca-agent, openstack-monasca-installer, openstack-neutron, openstack-octavia-amphora-image, python-Django, python-Flask, python-GitPython, python-Pillow, python-amqp, python-apicapi, python-keystoneauth1, python-oslo.messaging, python-psutil, python-pyroute2, python-pysaml2, python-tooz, python-waitress, storm, bind, jasper, java-1_8_0-openjdk, LibVNCServer, libxml2, python-ipaddress, rubygem-bundler, rubygem-puma, samba, slirp4netns, xen, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (firefox and webkit2gtk).

The io_uring subsystem is not much over oneyear old, having been merged for the 5.1 kernel in May 2019. It wasinitially added as a better way to perform asynchronous I/O from user space; over time it has gained numerous features and supportfor functionality beyond just moving bits around. What it has not yet gainedis any sort of security mechanism beyond what the kernel already providesfor the underlying system calls. That may be about to change, though, asthe result of thispatch set from Stefano Garzarella adding a set of user-configurablerestrictions to io_uring.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (mingw-podofo and python-rsa), openSUSE (LibVNCServer, mozilla-nss, nasm, openldap2, and permissions), Red Hat (dovecot, sane-backends, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (dbus), and SUSE (firefox and thunderbird).

In an earlier article, guest author Martin Michlmayr reviewed the todo.txt and Taskwarrior task managers. This article continues the process of examining taskmanagers by looking at tools for Org mode, which is a system originally created for Emacs, aswell as at tools that make use of the iCalendar standard. It is time to findout whether he can find a system that meets his needs.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, mailman, openjpeg2, ruby-rack, squid3, tomcat8, and xen), Fedora (botan2, kernel, LibRaw, mingw-OpenEXR, mingw-podofo, podofo, seamonkey, squid, and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (ffmpeg, mbedtls, mediawiki, and xpdf), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (bind, dbus, jbig2dec, and rh-nodejs12-nodejs), and SUSE (graphviz and xen).

The 5.8-rc5 kernel prepatch is out fortesting; it's a relatively large set of changes. "Maybe I'm indenial, but I still think we might hit the usual release schedule. A fewmore weeks to go before I need to make that decision, so it won't bekeeping me up at night."

For years, Windows PHP users have enjoyed builds provided directly by Microsoft. The company has contributed to the PHP project in many ways, with the binaries made available on windows.php.net being the most visible. Recently Microsoft Project Manager Dale Hirt announced that, beginning with PHP 8.0, Microsoft support for PHP on Windows would end.

Connecting one source of data to another isn't always easy because of differentstandards, data formats, and APIs to contend with, among the manychallenges. One of the groups that is trying to help with the challenge ofdata interoperability is the Linux Foundation's Open Data Platforminitiative (ODPi). At the 2020Open Source Summit North America virtual event on July 2, ODPiTechnical Steering Committee chairperson MandyChessell outlined the goals of ODPi and the projects that are part of it.She also described how ODPiis taking an open-source development approach to make data moreeasily accessible.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl, LibRaw, python-pillow, and python36), Mageia (coturn, samba, and vino), openSUSE (opera), and Ubuntu (openssl).

The LibreOffice project wouldseem to be on a roll. It produces what is widely seen as the leadingfree office-productivity suite, and has managed to move out of the shadowof the moribund (but brand-recognized) ApacheOpenOffice project. The LibreOffice 7 release is coming within a month, and the tenthanniversary of the founding of the Document Foundation arrives inSeptember. Meanwhile, LibreOfficeOnline is taking off and, seemingly, seeing some market success.So it is a bit surprising to see the project's core developersin a sort of crisis mode while users worry about a tag that showed up inthe project's repository.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.7.8, 5.4.51,4.19.132, 4.14.188, 4.9.230, and 4.4.230 stable kernels. As usual, these allcontain important fixes; users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox), Debian (ffmpeg, fwupd, ruby2.5, and shiro), Fedora (freerdp, gssdp, gupnp, mingw-pcre2, remmina, and xrdp), openSUSE (chocolate-doom), Oracle (firefox and kernel), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon and thunderbird).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 9, 2020 is available.

The Linux Mint project has made good on previous threats to actively prevent Ubuntu Snap packages from being installed through the APT package-management system without the user's consent. This move is the result of "major worries" from Linux Mint on Snap's impact with regard to user choice and software freedom. Ubuntu's parent company, Canonical, seems open to finding a solution to satisfy the popular distribution's concerns — but it too has interests to consider.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (roundcube), Fedora (chromium, firefox, and ngircd), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (djvulibre, ffmpeg, firefox, freetds, gd, gstreamer-plugins-base, icu, java-11-openjdk, libEMF, libexif, librsvg, LibVNCServer, libvpx, Mesa, nasm, nmap, opencv, osc, perl, php7, python-ecdsa, SDL2, texlive-filesystem, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cinder, python-os-brick).

Google has announcedthe creation of the Open UsageCommons, which is intended to help open-source projects manage theirtrademarks. From theorganization's own announcement: "We created the Open UsageCommons because free and fair open source trademark use is critical to thelong-term sustainability of open source. However, understanding andmanaging trademarks takes more legal know-how than most project maintainerscan do themselves. The Open Usage Commons is therefore dedicated tocreating a model where everyone in the open source chain – from projectmaintainers to downstream users to ecosystem companies – has peace of mindaround trademark usage and management. The projects in the Open UsageCommons will receive support specific to trademark protection andmanagement, usage guidelines, and conformance testing." Initialmembers include the Angular, Gerrit, and Istio projects.

The Cloudflare blog is running anoverview of sandboxing with seccomp(), culminating in a toolwritten there to sandbox any existing program. "We really liked the'zero code seccomp' approach with systemd SystemCallFilter= directive, butwere not satisfied with its limitations. We decided to take it one stepfurther and make it possible to prohibit any system call in any processexternally without touching its source code, so came up with the Cloudflaresandbox. It’s a simple standalone toolkit consisting of a shared libraryand an executable. The shared library is supposed to be used withdynamically linked applications and the executable is for statically linkedapplications."

Static web-site generators take page content written in a markuplanguage and render it into fully baked HTML, making it easy for developersto upload the result and serve a web site simply andsecurely. This article looks at Hugo, astatic-site generator written in Go and optimized for speed. It is aflexible tool that can be configured for a variety of use cases: simpleblogs, project documentation, larger news sites, and even governmentservices.

When support for classic BPF was added to the kernel many yearsago, there was no question of whether BPF programs could block in theirexecution. Their functionality was limited to examining a packet'scontents and deciding whether the packet should be forwarded or not; therewas nothing such a program could do to block. Since then, BPF has changeda lot, but the assumption that BPF programs cannot sleep has been builtdeeply into the BPF machinery. More recently, classic BPF has been pushedaside by the extended BPF dialect; thewider applicability of extended BPF is nowforcing a rethink of some basic assumptions.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (php7.3), Fedora (gst), Mageia (libvirt, mariadb, pdns-recursor, and ruby), openSUSE (chocolate-doom, coturn, kernel, live555, ntp, python3, and rust, rust-cbindgen), Oracle (virt:ol), Red Hat (file, firefox, gettext, kdelibs, kernel, kernel-alt, microcode_ctl, nghttp2, nodejs:10, nodejs:12, php, qemu-kvm, ruby, and tomcat), SUSE (libjpeg-turbo, mozilla-nspr, mozilla-nss, mozilla-nss, nasm, openldap2, and permissions), and Ubuntu (coturn, glibc, nss, and openexr).

The Home Assistant project has released version 0.112 of the open-source home automation hub we have previously covered, which is the eighth release of the project this year. While previous releases have largely focused on new integrations and enhancements to the front-end interface, in this release the focus has shifted more toward improving the performance of the database. It is important to be aware that there are significant database changes and multiple potential backward compatibility breaks to understand before attempting an upgrade to take advantage of the improvements.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, php7.0, and thunderbird), Fedora (ceph, gssdp, gupnp, libfilezilla, libldb, mediawiki, python-pillow, python36, samba, and xpdf), Mageia (curl, docker, firefox, libexif, libupnp, libvncserver, libxml2, mailman, ntp, perl-YAML, python-httplib2, tcpreplay, tomcat, and vlc), openSUSE (chocolate-doom, python3, and Virtualbox), Slackware (libvorbis), and SUSE (mozilla-nspr, mozilla-nss, systemd, tomcat, and zstd).

The 5.8-rc4 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. "The end result is that it's been fairly calm, andthere's certainly been discussion of upcoming fixes, but I still havethe feeling that 5.8 is looking fairly normal and things aredeveloping smoothly despite the size of this release."

Dan Book has done adetailed analysis of the Perl 7transition. "Large amount of CPAN modules will not work in Perl7; plans for working around this would either involve every affected CPANauthor, which is a virtual impossibility for the stated 1 year time frame;or the toolchain group, a loose group of people who each maintain variousmodules and systems that are necessary for CPAN to function, who eitherhave not been consulted as of yet or have not revealed their plans relatedto the tools they maintain. Going into this potential problem sufficientlywould be longer than this blog post, but suffice to say that a Perl wherehighly used CPAN modules don't seamlessly work is not Perl."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (docker.io and imagemagick), Fedora (alpine, firefox, hostapd, and mutt), openSUSE (opera), Red Hat (rh-nginx116-nginx), SUSE (ntp, python3, and systemd), and Ubuntu (firefox, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gke-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oem, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-riscv, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.3, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.3, linux-gke-5.0, linux-oem-osp1, net-snmp, and samba).

Earlier this year, Netflix developed and released a new Apache-licensed project named Dispatch. It is designed to coordinate the response to and the resolution of security-related incidents, but the project aims for more than just that. Rather, it hopes to be valuable for any type of one-off incident that needs coordination across an organization, such as a service outage.

The Linux Plumbers Conference has announcedthe second in a brief series of "town hall" events leading up to the full(virtual) conference starting August 24. This one features LWN editorJonathan Corbet presenting a version of his "Kernel Report" talk coveringthe current and future state of the kernel-development community. Thistalk is scheduled for July 16 at 9:00AM US/Mountain time (8:00AMUS/Pacific, 3:00PM UTC). Mark your calendars.

The Btrfs filesystem has had a long and sometimes turbulent history; LWNfirst wrote about it in 2007. It offersfeatures not found in any other mainline Linux filesystem, but reliabilityand performance problems have prevented its widespread adoption. There is atleast one company that is using Btrfs on a massive scale, though:Facebook. At the 2020Open Source Summit North America virtual event, Btrfs developer JosefBacik described why and how Facebook has invested deeply in Btrfs and where the remainingchallenges are.

The openSUSELeap 15.2 release is now available; see the announcement for a longlist of new features. "In general, software packages in thedistribution grew by the hundreds. Data fusion, Machine Learning and AIaren't all that is new in openSUSE Leap 15.2; a Real-Time Kernel formanaging the timing of microprocessors to ensure time-critical events areprocessed as efficiently as possible is available in this release."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and firefox-esr), Fedora (chromium and ntp), SUSE (ntp and unbound), and Ubuntu (libvncserver).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 2, 2020 is available.

In what may have seemed like an April Fool'sDay joke to some, Python creator Guido van Rossum recently floatedthe idea of bringing back the print statement—several months afterPython 2, which had such a statement, reached its end of life. In fact, VanRossum acknowledged that readers of his message to the python-ideas mailinglist might be checking the date: "No, it's not April 1st." Hewas serious about the idea—at least if others were interested in having thefeature—but he withdrew it fairly quickly when it became clear that therewere few takers. The main reason he brought it up is interesting, though:the new parser for CPython makes iteasy to bring back print from Python 2 (and before).

Stable kernels 5.7.7, 5.4.50, 4.19.131, 4.14.187, 4.9.229, and 4.4.229 have been released. They all containimportant fixes and users should upgrade.

The Go programming language was first releasedin 2009, with its 1.0 release made in March 2012. Even before the 1.0 release,some developers criticized the language as being too simplistic, partly dueto its lack of user-defined generictypes and functions parameterized by type. Despite this omission, Go is widely used, with an estimated 1-2 milliondevelopers worldwide. Over the years there have been several proposals toadd some form of generics to the language, but the recentproposal written by core developers Ian Lance Taylor and RobertGriesemer looks likely to be included in a future version of Go.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (bind, chromium, freerdp, imagemagick, sqlite, and tomcat8), Debian (coturn, imagemagick, jackson-databind, libmatio, mutt, nss, and wordpress), Fedora (libEMF, lynis, and php-PHPMailer), Red Hat (httpd24-nghttp2), and SUSE (ntp, openconnect, squid, and transfig).

Firefox 78.0 has been released. This is an Extended Support Release(ESR). The ProtectionsDashboard has new features to track the number of breaches that wereresolved from the dashboard and to see if any of your saved passwords mayhave been exposed in a breach. More details about this and other newfeatures can be found in the release notes.

The PHP project has released the first alpha of PHP 8, which is slated for general availability in November 2020. This initial test release includes many new features such as just-in-time (JIT) compilation, new constructs like Attributes, and more. One of twelve planned releases before the general availability release, it represents a feature set that is still subject to change.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (coturn, drupal7, libvncserver, mailman, php5, and qemu), openSUSE (curl, graphviz, mutt, squid, tomcat, and unbound), Red Hat (chromium-browser, file, kernel, microcode_ctl, ruby, and virt:rhel), Slackware (firefox), and SUSE (mariadb-100, mutt, unzip, and xmlgraphics-batik).

Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" has been released in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions. Linux Mint 20is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and will be supported until 2025. Release notesare available for Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.

The next release of the Fedora distribution — Fedora 33 — is currently scheduledfor the end of October. Fedora's nature as a fast-moving distributionensures that each release will contain a number of attention-gettingchanges, but Fedora 33 is starting to look like it may be a bit morevolatile than its immediate predecessors. Several relatively controversialchanges are currently under discussion on the project's mailing lists; readon for a summary.

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 iscomplete and ready for a planned release on July 2. Leap is theversion based on SUSE Linux Enterprise, but with many updated packages; seethe 15.2 featurespage for an overview of what's coming. "Leap 15.2 is filled withseveral containerization technologies like Singularity, which bringcontainers and reproducibility to scientific computing and thehigh-performance computing (HPC) world. Singularity first appeared in theLeap distribution in Leap 42.3 and provides functionality to build smallestminimal containers and runs the containers as single applicationenvironments. Another official package in Leap 15.2 islibcontainers-common, which allows the configuration of files and manpagesshared by tools that are based on the github.com/containers libraries, suchas Buildah, CRI-O, Podman and Skopeo. Docker containers and tooling makebuilding and shipping applications easy and fast."

The Zephyr project is aneffort to provide anopen-source realtime operating system (RTOS) that is designed to bridge the gapbetweenfull-featured operating systems like Linux and bare-metal developmentenvironments. It'sbeen over four years since Zephyr was publicly announced and discussed here(apparentlyto a bit of puzzlement). In thisarticle, guest authors Martí Bolívar and Carles Cufí give an update onthe project and its community as ofits v2.3.0release in June 2020; they also make some guesses about its near future.

Version 4.0 of the GnuCash finance manager is out. Significant changesinclude a command-line tool for performing a number of functions outside ofthe graphical interface, explicit support for accounts payable and accountsreceivable, translation improvements, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libtasn1-6, libtirpc, mcabber, picocom, pngquant, trafficserver, and zziplib), Fedora (curl and xen), openSUSE (bluez, ceph, chromium, curl, grafana, grafana-piechart-panel,, graphviz, mariadb, and mercurial), Oracle (nghttp2), Red Hat (microcode_ctl), SUSE (mutt, python3-requests, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (glib-networking and mailman).

The third 5.8 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. "Well, we had a big merge window, and we have a fairly big rc3 heretoo. The calm period for rc2 is clearly over.That said, I don't think there's anything _particularly_ scary inhere, and the size of this rc is probably simply a direct result ofthe fact that 5.8 is a big release."