~lwn | Bookmarks (370)

We are reliably informed by the calendar that yet another year has begun. That can only mean one thing: the time has come to go out on a limb with a series of ill-advised predictions that are almost certainly not how the year will actually go. We have to try; it's traditional, after all. Read on for our view of what's coming and how...

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.8, 6.6.69, and 6.1.123 stable kernels. They contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree, as usual.

While some people are focused on new and trendy languages, José Marchesi has, instead, gifted the world with a GCC front end for the Algol 68 language. This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating, generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced,...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (python-django and python-tornado), Fedora (libxml2), and Red Hat (python-virtualenv and python36:3.6).

Version 22.1 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution is out. We've been hard at work since Android 15's release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15's code-base...

Kees Cook describes his work resulting in a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the same first 12 characters as the initial commit in the kernel's repository. This is not yet in the upstream Linux tree, for fear of breaking countless other tools out in the wild. But it can serve as a test commit for those that want to get this fixed ahead...

The origins of the TCP and UDP network protocols can be traced back a full 50 years. Even though networks and their use have changed radically since those protocols were designed, they can still be found behind most networking applications. Unsurprisingly, these protocols are not optimal for all situations, so there is ongoing interest in the development of alternatives. One such is the Homa transport...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-good1.0 and opensc), Fedora (iwd and libell), and SUSE (chromium, govulncheck-vulndb, and poppler).

The 6.13-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus says: "It's been another week, but I'm happy to report that clearly most people actually seem to have been enjoying the holidays, because rc5 is tiny"

Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted three new stable kernel updates: 6.12.7, 6.6.68, and 6.1.122. As usual, he warns that all users of stable kernels must upgrade, although for many systems that seems unlikely to happen until January.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (node-postcss), Fedora (age, dr_libs, incus, libxml2, moodle, and python-sql), and SUSE (poppler and python-grpcio).

Continuing its tradition of yearly major releases on December 25, the Ruby programming-language project has released Ruby 3.4.0 (followed quickly by 3.4.1, which simply updates the version number). Ruby 3.4 includes lots of changes, including the addition of it as a less-confusing shorthand for _1 as a block parameter, switching to Prism as the default parser, adding the Happy Eyeballs version 2 algorithm to the...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (fastnetmon, webkit2gtk, and xen), Fedora (sympa), Oracle (postgresql), and Red Hat (pcp, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland).

It is often said that the definition of insanity is repeating the same action and expecting different results. Be that as it may, LWN has repeatedly started a new year with a set of predictions, only to have to review how badly they went at the end. There was no break in that pattern this year, so there is no help for it; the...

The systemd v257 release brings a number of incremental enhancements to various components and utilities for working with Linux systems. This includes more support for varlink, automated downloading of disk images at boot time, and a number of improvements to the secure-boot process for unified kernel images (UKIs), which we have covered in a separate article.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, edk2:20240524, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, libsndfile:1.0.31, mpg123:1.32.9, pam, php:8.1, php:8.2, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.9:3.9.21, skopeo, and unbound:1.16.2), Debian (intel-microcode), Fedora (python3-docs and python3.12), Mageia (emacs), Red Hat (podman), and SUSE (gdb, govulncheck-vulndb, libparaview5_12, mozjs115, mozjs78, and vhostmd).

The systemd project has been working for some time on promoting unified kernel images (UKIs), a format that bundles a kernel, initial disk image, kernel command line, and other associated data into a single file. The advantage of the format is the ability to authenticate the entire collection with secure boot, which makes it easier for end users to know that their operating system...

The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 41 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, David Cantrell, Tomáš Hrčka, and Fabio Alessandro Locati. One seat was open on the Mindshare Committee and that went to Luis Bazan as the only eligible candidate nominated in this period.

In the past, suspensions of Python core developers have effectively been permanent because the recipients of the punishment chose not to return. Things have played out quite differently after Tim Peters was suspended for three months back in August; Peters has been posting to the Python discussion forum since his suspension ended in early November and, generally, getting back to work as usual. That...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-base1.0, libxstream-java, php-laravel-framework, python-urllib3, and sqlparse), Fedora (chromium, libcomps, libdnf, mingw-directxmath, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-orc, ofono, prometheus-podman-exporter, python3-docs, python3.13, and webkitgtk), Mageia (mozjs78, thunderbird, and tomcat, tomcat packages), SUSE (aalto-xml, flatten-maven-plugin, jctools, moditect, netty, netty-tcnative, chromedriver, govulncheck-vulndb, grpc, kernel, python-aiohttp, python-python-sql, and vim), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15 and linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4,...