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Welcome to LWN.net [LWN.net]Welcome to LWN.net [LWN.net] LWN.net News from the source ContentWeekly EditionArchivesSearchKernelSecurityEvents calendarUnread commentsLWN FAQWrite for us User: Password: | | Subscribe / Log in / New account Welcome to LWN.net LWN.net is a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities. See the LWN FAQ for more information, and please consider subscribing to gain full access and support our activities. [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 3, 2024 Posted Oct 3, 2024 1:24 UTC (Thu) The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 3, 2024 is available. Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition Front: WordPress; Sched_ext; 6.12 Merge window; Kangrejos coverage; OpenSSH in Debian; Gccrs update; Inkscape 1.4. Briefs: CUPS security; Arch Linux support; 64-bit time in Gentoo; Manjaro 24.1; Tails and Tor; FFmpeg 7.1; Firefox 131.0; PostgreSQL 17; Tcl/Tk 9.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. Read more [$] Inkscape 1.4 coming soon [Development] Posted Oct 2, 2024 17:04 UTC (Wed) by rolandixor The open-source vector-graphics editor, Inkscape, is expected to release version 1.4 in October. The release represents an evolutionary step for the program, which brings new features, user-interface improvements, new and improved file-format support, and important changes to the code base. The changes in this release should improve the user experience for both casual and professional designers, and make Inkscape more compatible with proprietary vector-graphics software, including Adobe Illustrator and Affinity Designer. Full Story (comments: none) [$] BTF, Rust, and the kernel toolchain [Kernel] Posted Oct 2, 2024 14:15 UTC (Wed) by daroc BPF Type Format (BTF), BPF's debugging information format, has undergone rapid evolution to match the evolving needs of BPF programs. José Marchesi spoke at Kangrejos about some of that work — and how it could impact Rust, specifically. He discussed debug information, kernel-specific relocations, and the planned changes to kernel stack unwinding. Each of these will require some amount of work to fully support in Rust, but preliminary signs look promising. Full Story (comments: 6) [$] An update on gccrs development [Development] Posted Oct 1, 2024 12:53 UTC (Tue) by corbet One concern that has often been expressed about the Rust language is that there is only one compiler for it. That makes it hard to say what the standard version of the language is and restricts the architectures that can be targeted by Rust code to those that the available compiler supports. Adding a Rust frontend to GCC would do much to address those concerns; at the 2024 GNU Tools Cauldron, Pierre-Emmanuel Patry gave an update on the state of that work and what its objectives are. Full Story (comments: 71) [$] Coccinelle for Rust [Kernel] Posted Sep 30, 2024 19:01 UTC (Mon) by daroc Tathagata Roy has been working to make the Coccinelle tool that is used (among other things) to automate the refactoring of C code work on Rust code as well. Roy gave a presentation at Kangrejos about that work, including the creative approaches necessary to work with Rust's more complicated control flow and syntax. Full Story (comments: 11) [$] The rest of the 6.12 merge window [Kernel] Posted Sep 30, 2024 17:47 UTC (Mon) by corbet Linus Torvalds released 6.12-rc1 and closed the 6.12 merge window on September 29; at that point, 11,260 non-merge change sets had been pulled into the mainline for the 6.12 release. That is the lowest number of merge-window changes since 5.17-rc1 in January 2022, which brought in 11,068 changesets. Nonetheless, 6.12 brings a number of interesting changes, many of which were included in the roughly 4,500 changes merged since the summary of the first half of the 6.12 merge window was written. Full Story (comments: none) [$] The WordPress mess [Development] Posted Sep 30, 2024 17:01 UTC (Mon) by jzb WordPress is the world's most popular open‑source blogging and content‑management platform. In its 20‑plus years of existence, WordPress has been something of a poster child for open source, similar to Linux and Firefox. It introduced the concept of open source to millions of bloggers, small‑business owners, and others who have deployed WordPress to support their web‑publishing needs. Unfortunately, it is now in the spotlight due to an increasingly ugly dispute between two companies, Automattic and WP Engine, that has spilled over into the WordPress community. Full Story (comments: 17) [$] Debian changes OpenSSH packaging [Distributions] Posted Sep 27, 2024 14:01 UTC (Fri) by jzb In the wake of the XZ backdoor, the Debian project has revisited some of the patches included in its OpenSSH packages to improve security. The outcome of this is that the project will be splitting out support for Kerberos key exchange into a separate set of packages, though not until after the Debian 13 ("trixie") release expected next year. The impact on Debian users should be minimal, but it is an interesting look into the changes Linux distributions make to upstream software as well as some of the long-term consequences of those choices. Full Story (comments: 22) [$] Getting PCI driver abstractions upstream [Kernel] Posted Sep 26, 2024 17:28 UTC (Thu) by daroc Danilo Krummrich gave a talk at Kangrejos 2024 focusing on the question of how the Rust-for-Linux project could improve at getting device and driver abstractions upstream. As a case study, he used some of his recent work that attempts to make it possible to write a PCI driver entirely in Rust. There wasn't time to go into as much detail as he would have liked, but he did demonstrate that it is possible to interface with the kernel's module loader in a way that is much harder to screw up than the current standard approach in C. Full Story (comments: 1) [$] Sched_ext at LPC 2024 [Kernel] Posted Sep 26, 2024 14:51 UTC (Thu) by corbet The extensible scheduler class (sched_ext) enables the implementation of CPU schedulers as a set of BPF programs loaded from user space; it first hit the mailing lists in late 2022. Sched_ext has engendered its share of controversy since, but is currently slated to be part of the 6.12 kernel release. At the 2024 Linux Plumbers Conference, the growing sched_ext community held one of its first public gatherings; sched_ext would appear to have launched a new burst of creativity in scheduler design. Full Story (comments: 3) Manjaro 24.1 released [Distributions] Posted Oct 2, 2024 14:01 UTC (Wed) by jzb Version 24.1 of the Arch-based Manjaro distribution is now available with the 6.10 Linux kernel, GNOME 46.5, KDE Plasma 6.1 and KDE Gear 24.08: Plasma 6.1 on Wayland now has a feature that "remembers" what you were doing in your last session like it did under X11. Although this is still work in progress, If you log off and shut down your computer with a dozen open windows, Plasma will now open them for you the next time you power up your desktop, making it faster and easier to get back to what you were doing. At Manjaro we are still defaulting to X11, however switching to Wayland can be done easily by selecting the wanted session in your display manager. The project also offers minimal install images with the 6.6 LTS and 6.1 LTS kernels to support older hardware as needed. Comments (none posted) Security updates for Wednesday [Security] Posted Oct 2, 2024 13:10 UTC (Wed) by jzb Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Fedora (cjson and php), Oracle (389-ds-base, freeradius, grafana, kernel, and krb5), Slackware (cryfs, cups, and mozilla), SUSE (OpenIPMI, openssl-3, openvpn, thunderbird, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (cups, cups-filters, knot-resolver, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, orc, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, python-asyncssh, ruby-devise-two-factor, and vim). Full Story (comments: none) FFmpeg 7.1 released [Development] Posted Oct 1, 2024 17:31 UTC (Tue) by jzb Version 7.1 of the FFmpeg audio/video toolkit has been released. Important changes in this release include the VVC decoder reaching stable status, and inclusion of support for MV-HEVC decoding (which is generated by recent phones and VR headsets), as well as support for Vulkan encoding with H264 and HEVC. See the announcement and changelog for full details. Comments (2 posted) Firefox 131.0 released [Development] Posted Oct 1, 2024 16:43 UTC (Tue) by corbet Version 131.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include the ability to temporarily grant permissions to sites and a preview that pops up when hovering over tabs. Comments (none posted) Security updates for Tuesday [Security] Posted Oct 1, 2024 12:52 UTC (Tue) by corbet Security updates have been issued by Debian (debian-security-support, nghttp2, and sqlite3), Oracle (cups-filters, kernel, and osbuild-composer), SUSE (openssl-3), and Ubuntu (bubblewrap, flatpak and python2.7, python3.5). Full Story (comments: 2) Four new stable kernels [Kernel] Posted Sep 30, 2024 16:23 UTC (Mon) by jake The 6.11.1, 6.10.12, 6.6.53, and 6.1.112 stable kernels have been released. Each contains important fixes and users of those series should upgrade. Comments (none posted) Tcl/Tk 9.0 released [Development] Posted Sep 30, 2024 14:56 UTC (Mon) by jake The most recent major release of the Tcl/Tk language and graphical-user-interface toolkit, Tcl/Tk 9.0, has been released, a mere 27 years after the 8.0 major release in 1997. There have been plenty of releases in the interim, though, as can be seen in the Tcl chronology. The 9.0 release brings 64-bit data values, better Unicode support, the ability to use zip files as filesystems, a switch to use epoll() or kqueue() where they are available, SVG support in Tk, access to notifications and other desktop-platform services in Tk, and lots more. For more information, see the release notes for Tcl and Tk that can be downloaded as Markdown files from the announcement page. (Thanks to Matt Bradley.) Comments (24 posted) Security updates for Monday [Security] Posted Sep 30, 2024 14:22 UTC (Mon) by jake Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cups-filters, net-snmp, and osbuild-composer), Debian (booth, cups, cups-filters, python-asyncssh, ruby-httparty, ruby-loofah, ruby-rails-html-sanitizer, tryton-server, unbound, and wireshark), Fedora (chromium, cjson, cups, cups-browsed, libcupsfilters, and libppd), Gentoo (Apache HTTPD, Docker, HashiCorp Consul, IcedTea, nginx, tmux, and yt-dlp), Mageia (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, & java-latest-openjdk and libreoffice), Red Hat (git-lfs, grafana, and osbuild-composer), and SUSE (chromedriver, chromium, coredns, json-java-20240303, kernel, libmozjs-128-0, maven-archetype, python3, python312, and quagga). Full Story (comments: none) Arch Linux getting support from Valve [Distributions] Posted Sep 30, 2024 7:03 UTC (Mon) by corbet The Arch Linux project has announced that Valve will be helping the distribution with a couple of important initiatives: Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers. Full Story (comments: none) Kernel prepatch 6.12-rc1 [Kernel] Posted Sep 30, 2024 6:07 UTC (Mon) by corbet Linus has released 6.12-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. Despite conference travel (both for me and several maintainers), things seemed to go mostly fairly normally. There's a couple of notable new features in here: For one thing, PREEMPT_RT is now mainlined and enabled as a config option (you do need to enable "EXPERT" to get the question). For another, sched_ext also got merged. Comments (none posted) --> More news items Copyright © 2024, Eklektix, Inc. Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvaldsenen1727955601https://lwn.net