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Boudhayan Bhattcharya has posted a lengthy article about the announcement that the Freedesktop project is dropping OpenH264 from the Freedesktop SDK for Flatpak applications and runtimes. Some Flatpak applications that depend on the Freedesktop runtime version 23.08 will lose H.264 playback support starting with the release scheduled for April, unless application developers replace it with the ffmpeg-full extension. The 24.08 runtime is unaffected, and...

By the time that Linus Torvalds released the 6.14 kernel, 11,003 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline, making this one of the smallest releases we have seen in some time. Indeed, one must go back to the 4.0 release, which happened almost exactly ten years ago, to find a release with fewer changesets than 6.14. Even so, "small" is relative, and 6.14...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-rack), Fedora (chromium, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, OpenIPMI, and python-jinja2), Mageia (kernel, kernel-linus, and wpa_supplicant, hostapd), Red Hat (fence-agents, kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, libxslt, and pcs), SUSE (cadvisor, docker, freetype2, nodejs-electron, php8, rsync, u-boot, warewulf4, webkit2gtk3, and zvbi), and Ubuntu (elfutils, python3.5, python3.8, ruby-rack, smartdns, and zvbi).

Linus has released the 6.14 kernel, a bit later than expected: So it's early Monday morning (well - early for me, I'm not really a morning person), and I'd love to have some good excuse for why I didn't do the 6.14 release yesterday on my regular Sunday afternoon release schedule. I'd like to say that some important last-minute thing came up and delayed...

The adoption of open-source software in governments has had its ups and downs. While open source seems like a "no-brainer", it turns out that governments can be surprisingly resistant to using FOSS for a variety of reasons. Federico González Waite spoke in the Open Government track at SCALE 22x in Pasadena, California to recount his experiences working with and for the Mexican government. He...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxslt, mercurial, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (chromium, dotnet8.0, ffmpeg, jupyterlab, and kitty), Mageia (expat and libxslt), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (apptainer, chromium, kernel, libarchive, mercurial, python311, radare2, xorg-x11-server, and zvbi), and Ubuntu (golang-github-cli-go-gh-v2 and nltk).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.13.8, 6.12.20, and 6.6.84 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced the results of its recent board of directors election. Ruth Suehle and McCoy Smith are new to the board, while Carlo Piana will serve another term. The results, however, seem tainted in the eyes of some participants and observers. The election has been plagued by missteps from the beginning. It has culminated with the exclusion of three...

As a system runs and its memory becomes fragmented, allocating large, physically contiguous regions of memory becomes increasingly difficult. Much effort over the years has gone into avoiding the need to make such allocations whenever possible, but there are times when they simply cannot be avoided. The kernel's contiguous memory allocator (CMA) subsystem attempts to make such allocations possible, but it has never been...

Julien Malka has called for the NixOS project to use build-reproducibility to detect when a program has a maintainer-generated tarball that results in a different artifact than building from source. There are good reasons for projects to release maintainer-generated tarballs, but since the materials included in them are usually documentation, extra build scripts, and so on, it makes sense to check that they don't...

Brendan Jackman has been working to try to get ahead of the next hardware CPU vulnerability before it gets discovered. In January, he posted the second version of a patch set that introduces address-space isolation (ASI) as a way of preventing future CPU vulnerabilities from leaking important information. The core concept is to ensure that data that is not currently needed is not present...

Raspberry Pi has announced rpi-image-gen, a tool to create custom software images for its devices. rpi-image-gen is a Bash orientated scripting engine capable of producing software images with different on-disk partition layouts, file systems and profiles using collections of metadata and a defined flow of execution. It provides the means to create a highly customised software image for your Raspberry Pi device. rpi-image-gen is...

The Asahi Linux project, working to support Linux on Apple hardware, has published a progress report to coincide with the 6.14 kernel release. Now that Rust for Linux abstractions are starting to be merged at a healthy pace, we are faced with an emerging challenge. It is rare for any kernel patch to survive the mailing list without at least a couple of non-trivial...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (fluent-bit, openssh, php, and webkitgtk), Mageia (freerdp), Oracle (libreoffice and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (kernel-rt), Slackware (libarchive), SUSE (apptainer, gitea-tea, libxml2, tomcat, webkit2gtk3, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (libxslt and pam-pkcs11).

As the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) approaches, the density of memory-management patches on the mailing lists has increased. Included among those are patches aimed at improving the reliability and performance of huge-page allocation, implementing page promotion on tiered-memory systems, adding a different approach to deduplicating memory, and replacing the BPF memory allocator. Read on for an overview of each.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (php7.4, python-django, and python3.9), Fedora (bluez, iwd, libell, and radare2), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, mosquitto, tomcat, tomcat packages, and vim), Oracle (firefox, grub2, python3, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (fence-agents, php:7.4, and python-jinja2), SUSE (assimp-devel, crane, ffmpeg-4, freetype2, helm, kernel, kured, python-Django, python-Jinja2, python311-Django4, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (alpine, djoser, libxslt, postgresql-9.5, and valkey).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Oxidizr; Spectre mitigations; Frozen pages; Mapcount madness; Open-source risks; /e/OS. Briefs: Supply chain attacks; SystemRescue 12.00; Casual Make; GIMP 3.0; Git 2.49.0; GNOME 48; PeerTube 7.1; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

GNOME 48 ("Bengaluru") has been released. As usual, this release includes a number of new features and enhancements including support for shortcuts in the Orca screen reader on Wayland, new fonts, addition of image editing to Image Viewer, and more. GNOME 48 includes a number of notable performance improvements. The most significant of these is the introduction of dynamic triple buffering. This change has undergone...

Modern CPUs all have multiple hardware vulnerabilities that the kernel needs to mitigate; the 6.13 kernel has workarounds for 14 security-sensitive CPU bugs just on x86_64. Several of those have multiple variants, or multiple mitigations that apply on different microarchitectures. There are different kernel command-line options for each of these mitigations, which leads to a confusing situation for users trying to figure out how...

Version 7.1 of PeerTube, a tool for sharing videos online, has been released. Notable features in this release include improved support for the Podcast 2.0 standard, better playback stability, and a new view protocol enabled by default to allow PeerTube to handle more simultaneous viewers. See the release notes for more details.

/e⁠/⁠OS is a privacy-centric, open-source mobile operating system that has primarily been targeted at mobile phones, with only a few community supported images available for tablet devices. In December, Murena—a company that sells devices with /⁠e⁠/⁠OS preinstalled—announced that /⁠e⁠/⁠OS now officially supports tablets as well, starting with the Pixel tablet. The user experience is close enough to mainstream alternatives to make it attractive, but...

A security company called Fenrisk has posted an overview of a pair of claimed successful supply-chain attacks on the Fedora and openSUSE distributions. We successfully identified vulnerabilities in the Pagure, the Git forge used by Fedora to store their package definitions. We also compromised Open Build Service, the all-in-one toolchain used and developed by the openSUSE project for compilation and packaging. Their exploitation by...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (tzdata), Fedora (expat and tigervnc), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (dcmtk), and Ubuntu (restrictedpython and uriparser).

If all goes according to plan, the Ubuntu project will soon be replacing many of the traditional GNU utilities with implementations written in Rust, such as those created by the uutils project, which we covered in February. Wholesale replacement of core utilities at the heart of a Linux distribution is no small matter, which is why Canonical's VP of engineering, Jon Seager, has released...