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Konstantin Ryabitsev started a session on development tooling at the 2024 Maintainers Summit by saying that he does not want to be a "wrecking ball". If a given workflow is working for people, he does not want to try to force any sort of change. That said, he has ideas for how he can continue his work on providing better tooling for the development...

The SUSE Security Team Blog has a detailed review of the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 6.2.1 release: The rather complex PCP software suite was difficult to judge just from a cursory look, so we decided to take a closer look especially at PCP's networking logic at a later time. This report contains two CVEs and some non-CVE related findings we also gathered during the follow-up...

As of this writing, 6,778 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel for the 6.12 release — over half of the work that had been staged in linux-next prior to the opening of the merge window. There has been a lot of refactoring and cleanup work this time around, but also some significant changes. Read on for a summary of the first...

The OpenSSH project has released version 9.9. This version includes support for the new post-quantum cryptography standard from NIST. The release also includes the next step in the deprecation of DSA keys — they are now disabled by default at compile time, and are expected to be removed entirely in early 2025. The release also contains the normal mixture of bug fixes and small...

The kernel normally sits firmly between user space and the system's peripheral devices, and provides a standard interface to those devices. At times, though, a more direct interface to a device is desired — but such interfaces can be controversial. At the 2024 Maintainers Summit, the assembled developers considered a specific case — the proposed fwctl subsystem — as well as the role of...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (bluez, chromium, frr, iwd, libell, python3.11, python3.8, python3.9, and ruby), Mageia (kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, and kmod-virtualbox and kernel-linus), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (kernel, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, kubernetes1.25, libmfx, and python-azure-identity), and Ubuntu (emacs, emacs24, emacs25, libreoffice, postgresql-9.5, python2.7, python3.5, and tgt).

On September 19, Thomas Gleixner delivered the pull request for the realtime preemption enablement patches to Linus Torvalds — in printed form, wrapped in gold, with a ribbon, as Torvalds had requested. It was a significant milestone, marking the completion of a project that required 20 years of effort. Congratulations are due to everybody involved. Torvalds acted on the pull request the following morning.

Dirk Behme led a session discussing the use of Rust's question-mark operator in the kernel at Kangrejos 2024. He was particularly concerned with the concept of "silent" errors that don't print any messages to the console. Other attendees were less convinced that this was a problem, but his presentation sparked a lot of discussion about whether the Rust-for-Linux project could improve error handling in...

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) project is nearing the release of RPM 4.20, the last major planned update for the RPM 4.x series. It has few user-facing changes, but several additions and enhancements for developers—as well as some small incompatibilities that will likely require RPM packagers to revise their spec files. 4.20 will be rolling out to many users soon, in Fedora 41, which is scheduled...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (expat and tinyproxy), Fedora (frr, microcode_ctl, python3.10, python3.12, python3.6, and ruby), Oracle (expat, fence-agents, firefox, ghostscript, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, openssl, ruby:3.3, and thunderbird), SUSE (clamav, ffmpeg-4, kernel, libmfx, python3, python312, runc, ucode-intel, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (apache2, git, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm,...

Tracking of regressions seems like an important task for any project; there is no other way to ensure that known problems are fixed. At the 2024 Maintainers Summit, though, Thorsten Leemhuis, who has been doing that work for the kernel, expressed some doubts about whether it is worth continuing. The result was an energetic session on how regression tracking should be done better, and...

Version 47 of the GNOME desktop has been released. Changes include configurable accent colors, better small-screen support, some performance improvements, new file open and save dialogs, and more.

The 6.10.11, 6.6.52, and 6.1.111 stable kernel updates have all been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Version 6.0 of the Swift programming language has been released. Notable changes include new low-level programming features, expanded Linux support, and a preview release of the Embedded Swift language subset for embedded software development with a toolchain for Arm and RISC-V targets. See the CHANGELOG for full details of changes in 6.0.

Version R1/beta5 for the Haiku project, an open-source "spiritual successor to BeOS", has been released. Notable changes in this release include a TUN/TAP network driver, basic support for USB audio devices, TCP throughput improvements, a rewritten driver for the FAT filesystem, read-only support for Unix File System 2 (UFS2), as well as hundreds of bug fixes and performance improvements since the last release in...

A Linux system is made up of a large number of interdependent components, all of which must support each other well. It can thus be surprising that, it seems, the developers working on those components do not often speak with each other. In the hope of improving that situation, efforts have been made in recent years to attract toolchain developers to the kernel-heavy Linux...

Version 19.1.0 of the LLVM compiler suite has been released: This is the first release in the LLVM 19.x series and represents 6 months of work the LLVM community. During this period 1502 unique authors contributed 18925 commits (3605729 lines added and 1665792 lines removed) to LLVM. As usual, there is a long list of changes; see the release notes for LLVM, Libc++, lld,...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (pcs), Debian (expat, galera-4, libreoffice, mariadb-10.5, and php-twig), Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (ghostscript and git), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-bad, libvpl, python-dnspython, python3, and python36), and Ubuntu (expat, frr, libxmltok, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, openssl, and quagga).

Kangrejos 2024 started off with a talk from Benno Lossin about his recent work to establish a standard for safety documentation in Rust kernel code. Lossin began his talk by giving a brief review of what safety documentation is, and why it's needed, before moving on to the current status of his work. Safety documentation is easier to read and write when there's a...

Vanilla OS, an immutable desktop Linux distribution designed for developers and advanced users, has recently published its 2.0 "Orchid" release. Previously based on Ubuntu, Vanilla OS has now shifted to Debian unstable ("sid"). The release has made it easier to install software from other distributions' package repositories, and it is now theoretically possible to install and run Android applications as well.

Four researchers have published a formal proof that Linux's new deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) is secure in a particular sense — specifically, that the number of queries that would need to be made to it to uncover its internal state depends on the quality of the entropy it can collect from different sources. As long as it can gather enough entropy, it produces...

The generation of binary code for the kernel's BPF virtual machine has been limited to the Clang compiler since the beginning; even developers who use GCC to build kernels must use Clang to compile to BPF. Work has been underway for some years on adding a BPF backend to GCC as well; the developers involved ran a session at the 2024 GNU Tools Cauldron...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (php-twig and pymongo), Fedora (linux-firmware, microcode_ctl, and python3.13), Mageia (clamav, microcode, postgresql13 and postgresql15, python3-webob, suricata, tcpreplay, tgt, and wireshark), Oracle (httpd, kernel, and linux-kernel), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, pcs, and thunderbird), SUSE (389-ds, chromium, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, htmldoc, kernel, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (clamav, curl, dcmtk, dovecot, nginx, openssh, and python3.10, python3.12, python3.8).