Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/988638/

Read-copy-update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that was added to the
Linux kernel in October 2002. RCU is most frequently used as a replacement
for reader-writer locking, but is also used in a
number of other ways. This article covers recent changes to the RCU
API; it was contributed by Paul McKenney, Boqun Feng, Frederic Weisbecker,
Joel Fernandes, Neeraj Upadhyay, and Uladzislau Rezki.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/988984/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 12, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989272/

CPU scheduling is a challenging job; since it inherently requires making
guesses about what the demands on the system will be in the future, it
remains reliant on heuristics, despite ongoing efforts to remove them.
Some of those heuristics take special note of tasks that are (or appear to
be) waiting for fast I/O operations. There is some unhappiness, though,
with how this factor is used, leading to a couple of patches taking rather
different approaches to improve the situation.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989605/

Version 1.0
of the Radicle development platform has been released.

Radicle 1.0 represents the culmination of years of experimentation
and hard work from our team and community, where we set out to
ensure that free and open source software ecosystems can flourish
without having to rely on the whims of Big Tech. We designed
Radicle with a first-principles approach, as a natural extension to
Git, expanding it to work in a collaborative, local-first,
peer-to-peer setting.

LWN looked at Radicle in March.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989602/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti), Fedora (aardvark-dns, expat, and firefox), Mageia (ffmpeg, ntfs-3g, and vim), Oracle (emacs, glib2, java-11-openjdk, and qt5-qtbase), Red Hat (emacs, python-setuptools, python3.11, python3.11-setuptools, python3.12-setuptools, python3.9, and python39:3.9), Slackware (netatalk), SUSE (buildah, expat, java-1_8_0-ibm, kanidm, kernel, and postgresql16), and Ubuntu (netty, php7.0, php7.2, tiff, and webkit2gtk).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989489/

Jacob Adams wanders into
the kernel’s hibernation code:

How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How
does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to
read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular
hardware/software boundary is navigated.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989426/

Linus has released 6.11-rc7 for testing.

And I wish I could say that things have calmed down, but I can’t
really say that. In fact, rc7 is slightly bigger than both rc6 and
rc5 were, both in number of commits, and in actual diff
size. That’s not really how it should work out.

That said, there’s nothing *scary* in here.

He is apparently “still waffling” about whether to release 6.11 next
weekend, which would cause the 6.12 merge window to land on top of the
Maintainers Summit, Linux Plumbers Conference, and Open Source Summit.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989409/

The
6.10.9,
6.6.50, and
6.1.109
stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of
important fixes.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989215/

Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the Linux man pages for the
last four years, has announced
that he will have to stop that work.

I’ve been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored
that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work
economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop
working on this project. If any company has interests in the
future of the project, I’d welcome an offer to sponsor my work
here; if so, please let me know.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989212/

Work on realtime preemption for the Linux kernel got its start almost exactly 20 years ago
(though it had its roots in earlier work, of course). It is fair to say
that finishing that job has taken a bit longer than anybody involved would
have expected. Now, though, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has posted a brief
patch series making it possible to enable realtime preemption in the
mainline kernel on three architectures.

With the printk bits merged, PREEMPT_RT could be enabled on X86,
ARM64 and Risc-V. These three architectures merged required changes
over the years leaving me in a position where I have no essential
changes in the queue that would affect them.

Congratulations are due to the many developers who have worked on this
project for the last two decades.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989196/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bubblewrap, flatpak), Debian (libxml2), Fedora (lua-mpack, mingw-python3, python-django, python-django4.2, python3.11, python3.13, and python3.9), Oracle (bubblewrap, flatpak), Red Hat (fence-agents, python-urllib3, resource-agents, and wget), Slackware (expat and mozilla), SUSE (buildah, chromium, firefox, gradle, java-1_8_0-ibm, kubernetes1.26, postgresql16, python-Django, python312-pip, and systemd), and Ubuntu (python-aiohttp).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989106/

Version
1.81.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the
stabilization of the Error trait in core, some new sort
algorithms, some linting improvements, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/989047/

Version 4.21.0 of the Samba Windows interoperability suite has been
released. Changes include some authentication hardening, a number of LDAP
improvements, per-user and per-group veto and hide files, group-managed
service accounts, and quite a bit more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/987605/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 5, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/988862/

The call for candidates
has gone out for the 2024 election of members of the Linux Foundation
Technical Advisory Board:

The TAB exists to provide advice from the kernel community to the
Linux Foundation and holds a seat on the LF’s board of directors;
it also serves to facilitate interactions both within the community
and with outside entities. Over the last year, the TAB has
overseen the organization of the Linux Plumbers Conference, advised
on the setup of the kernel CVE numbering authority, worked behind
the scenes to help resolve a number of contentious community
discussions, worked with the Linux Foundation on community
conference planning, and more.

Nominations are due by September 20.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/988438/

Much of the early Rust code for the kernel has taken the form of
reimplementations of existing drivers as a proof of concept. One project,
though, is entirely new: the driver for Apple GPUs written by Asahi Lina.
This driver has shipped with Asahi
Linux for some time and, by many accounts, is stable, usable, and a
shining example of how Rust can be used in a complex kernel subsystem.
That driver remains outside of the mainline kernel, though, and merging
currently looks like a distant prospect. The reasons for that state of
affairs highlight some of the difficulties inherent in integrating a new
language (and its associated development style) into the Linux kernel.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/988570/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python3.12), Debian (calibre, exfatprogs, frr, git, libtommath, nbconvert, ruby-nokogiri, ruby-tzinfo, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (flatpak, lua-mpack, and python3.12), Red Hat (389-ds-base, 389-ds:1.4, buildah, fence-agents, gvisor-tap-vsock, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, orc, postgresql, postgresql:12, postgresql:13, postgresql:15, python-urllib3, python3.12, and skopeo), SUSE (389-ds, bubblewrap and flatpak, cacti, cacti-spine, curl, glib2, kernel-firmware, libqt5-qt3d, libqt5-qtquick3d, opera, python39, qemu, unbound, xen, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, linux-raspi-5.4, and python-webob).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/988184/

Linus has released 6.11-rc6 for testing.
“Things look pretty normal, although we have perhaps unusually many
filesystem fixes here, spread out over smb, xfs, bcachefs and netfs.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/987566/

Here is a piece of advice for anybody wanting an easy and frustration-free
life: do not run your own email system. While there numerous advantages to
keeping some control over your communications, there is also a long list of
things that can go wrong. A recent failure of spam filtering on the LWN
email system illustrated one of those ways, as well as shining a light on
how even a seemingly independent email system is tied to other services
across the net.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/987850/

Back in 2021, the ElasticSearch search engine and Kibana visualization
platform were relicensed under the non-free
Server Side Public License (SSPL). Now, Elastic (the company owning those
projects) has announced
that those projects will also be distributable under the Affero GPL license.

We never stopped believing and behaving like an open source
community after we changed the license. But being able to use the
term Open Source, by using AGPL, an OSI approved license, removes
any questions, or fud, people might have.