Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909704/

The backers of the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project, which was the
subject of an intense discussion at the GNU
Tools Cauldron, have finally posted
their plans publicly.

Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include
Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and
CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and
security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of
the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community
will provide the most effective solution and best experience for
the GNU Toolchain developer community.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909687/

The openSUSE News site is looking
forward to the imminent preview release of the openSUSE ALP
distribution:

As far as “Les Droites” goes, users can look forward to a SLE Micro
like HostOS with self-healing abilities contributing to our
OS-as-a-Service/ZeroTouch story. The Big Idea is that the user
focuses on the application rather than the underlying host, which
manages, heals, and self-optimizes itself. Both Salt
(pre-installed) and Ansible will be available to simplify further
management.

Users can look forward to Full Disk Encryption (FDE) with TPM
support by default on x86_64. Another part of the deliverables are
numerous containerized system components including yast2, podman,
k3s, cockpit, Display Manager (GDM), and KVM. All of which users
can experiment with, which are simply referred to as Workloads.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909677/

The
5.19.12,
5.15.71,
5.10.146,
5.4.215,
4.19.260,
4.14.295, and
4.9.330
stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of
important fixes.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909676/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gdal, maven-shared-utils, thunderbird, webkit2gtk, and wpewebkit), Fedora (firefox and libofx), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, flatpak, grafana, kernel, libcaca, and opera), and Ubuntu (ghostscript and linux-gcp-5.15).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909604/

Version
5.6 of the LXD container manager is out. Changes include the ability
to stream log messages to a Grafana Loki server, Infiniband support for
virtual machines, a restricted network access mode, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909596/

Version 5.2 of the bash shell has been released.

The most notable new feature is the rewritten command substitution
parsing code, which calls the bison parser recursively. This
replaces the ad-hoc parsing used in previous versions, and allows
better syntax checking and catches syntax errors much earlier. The
shell attempts to do a much better job of parsing and expanding
array subscripts only once; this has visible effects in the `unset’
builtin, word expansions, conditional commands, and other builtins
that can assign variable values as a side effect.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909578/

Yoshua Wuyts gives an overview of async
Rust and why it is interesting.

Conversations around “why async” often focus on performance – a
topic which is highly dependent on workloads, and results with
people wholly talking past each other. While performance is not a
bad reason to choose async Rust, we often we only notice
performance when we experience a lack of it. So I want to instead
on which features async Rust provides which aren’t present in
non-async Rust.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909576/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dovecot and firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox and grafana), Red Hat (firefox and thunderbird), Slackware (dnsmasq and vim), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, kernel, libarchive, libcaca, mariadb, openvswitch, opera, permissions, podofo, snakeyaml, sqlite3, unzip, and vsftpd), and Ubuntu (expat, libvpx, linux-azure-fde, linux-oracle, squid, squid3, and webkit2gtk).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909265/

The CHERI
architecture is the product of a research program to extend common
CPU architectures
in a way that prevents many types of memory-related bugs (and
vulnerabilities). At the 2022 GNU Tools Cauldron,
Alex Coplan and Szabolcs Nagy described the work that has been done to
bring GCC and the GNU C Library (glibc) to this architecture. CHERI is a fundamentally
different approach to how memory is accessed, and supporting it properly is anything
but a trivial task.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909109/

The Human
Interface Device (HID) standard dates back to the Windows 95 era.
It describes how devices like mice and keyboards present themselves to the
host computer, and has created a world where a single driver can handle a
wide variety of devices from multiple manufacturers. Or it would have, if
there weren’t actual device manufacturers involved. In the real world,
devices stretch and break the standard, each in its own special way. At
the 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference,
Benjamin Tissoires described how BPF can be used to simplify the
task of supporting HID devices.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909392/

The 6.0-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

So I was thinking rc7 might end up larger than usual due to travel
hitting rc6, but it doesn’t really seem to have happened.

Yeah, maybe it’s marginally bigger than the historical average for
this time of the release cycle, but it definitely isn’t some
outlier, and it looks fairly normal. Which is all good, and makes
me think that the final release will happen right on schedule next
weekend, unless something unexpected happens. Knock wood.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909226/

Arch Linux has announced
that Python 2 is being removed from the distribution’s repositories.
“If you still require the python2 package you can keep it around, but
please be aware that there will be no security updates.”

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909095/

For better or worse, C is the lingua franca in the world of kernel
engineering. The core logic of the Linux kernel is written entirely in
C (with a bit of assembly), as are its drivers and modules. While C is
rightfully celebrated for
its powerful yet simple semantics, it is an older language that lacks
many of the features present in modern languages such as
Rust. The
BPF subsystem, on the other hand,
provides a programming environment that allows engineers to write
programs that can run safely in kernel space. At the 2022 Linux Plumbers
Conference in Dublin, Ireland, Alexei Starovoitov presented an overview
of how BPF has evolved over the years to provide a new model for kernel
programming.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/909085/

Version
1.64.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the
stabilization of the IntoFuture
trait, easier access to C-compatible types, the availability of
rust-analyzer via
rustup, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/908080/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 22, 2022 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/908638/

Public hosting systems for free software have come and gone over the years
but one of them, Sourceware, has been
supporting the development of most of the GNU toolchain for nearly
25 years.
Recently, an application was made to bring
Sourceware under the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), at least for
fundraising purposes. It turns out that there is a separate initiative,
developed in secret until now, with a different vision for the future of
Sourceware. The 2022 GNU
Tools Cauldron was the site of an intense discussion on how this
important community resource should be managed in the coming years.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/908928/

Version 43 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released; see the release notes for details.

This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board,
ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and
hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of
GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other
smaller enhancements.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/908911/

Konstantin Ryabitsev has announced
the availability of rendered
documentation from linux-next on kernel.org. This will be useful for
anybody wanting to see what the documentation for the next kernel release
will look like.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/908893/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (libconfuse, moodle, rizin, and thunderbird), Oracle (ELS kernel, gnupg2, ruby, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (booth, dbus-broker, gnupg2, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, mysql, nodejs, nodejs-nodemon, ruby, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (expat and mozilla), SUSE (kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools-container, virt-operator-container and vsftpd), and Ubuntu (bind9, ghostscript, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, lnux-hwe, inux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, and mako).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/908825/

The Debian project has begun voting on
changes to its approach to firmware needed to install a working
distribution. The original ballot option described in this article is still there, but this is
Debian so there are several others as well. Some of the additions include
changes to the Debian Social Contract that explicitly allow the shipping of
firmware needed to use Debian on hardware requiring that firmware.