Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033364/

Rebooting a computer ordinarily brings an abrupt end to any state built up
by the old system; the new kernel starts from scratch. There are, however,
people who would like to be able to reboot their systems without
disrupting the workloads running therein. Various developers are currently
partway through the project of adding this capability, in the form of
“kexec handover” and the “live update orchestrator”, to the kernel.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1034158/

The second 6.17 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “So it’s been a very calm week, and this is one of the smaller
rc2 releases we’ve had lately. I’m definitely not complaining, since I’ve
been jetlagged much of the week, but I have this suspicion that it just
means that next week will see more noise.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033058/

One might imagine that managing a page full of zeroes would be a relatively
straightforward task; there is, after all, no data of note that must be
preserved there. The management of the huge zero folio in the kernel,
though, shows that life is often not as simple as it seems. Tradeoffs
between conflicting objectives have driven the design of this core
functionality in different directions over the years, but much of the
associated complexity may be about to go away.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032862/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Indico; Arch Linux wiki; StarDict; Python debugging; LLM assistants for kernel development; 6.17 Merge window; Signed BPF programs.
• Briefs: CalyxOS; ACME on NGINX; Debian 13; LVFS sustainability; Go 1.25; Radicle 1.3.0; Rust 1.89; Syncthing 2.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033446/

Version 1.3.0 of
the Radicle distributed software forge system has been released. Changes
this time around include canonical
references, a new radicle-protocol crate, better log rotation,
and more. (LWN looked at Radicle in 2024).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033445/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and python-requests), Debian (ca-certificates-java), Fedora (chromium, clash-meta, mingw-python3, openjpeg, php-adodb, and toolbox), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), SUSE (chromium, ImageMagick, libgcrypt, libssh, libxml2, opensc, postgresql14, and postgresql16), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-oracle-6.14, and openjdk-17).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032095/

The 6.17-rc1 prepatch was released by
Linus Torvalds on August 10; the 6.17 merge window is now closed.
There were 11,404 non-merge changesets pulled into the mainline this time
around, a little over 7,000 of which came in after the first-half merge-window summary was
written. As one would expect, quite a few changes and new features were
included in that work.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033168/

Linus has released 6.17-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this development cycle.

Anyway, the merge window did end up looking fairly healthy, despite
me having to go through a couple of bisections for trouble spots
(one during travels with a laptop – not optimal, but thankfully it
was at least one of the “reliable symptoms that bisect right to the
culprit” kind). The stats look pretty normal both in patch size and
in number of commits.

In the end, 11,404 non-merge changesets found their way into the mainline
during the merge window.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033042/

CalyxOS is an Android distribution that
claims a focus on privacy and security. So when an
announcement from the project begins by saying “we want to assure
you that we have no reason to believe the security of CalyxOS and its
signing keys have been compromised“, chances are that good things are
not happening.

In this case, it would appear that Nicholas Merrill, one of the founders of
the project, has left for unclear reasons, and CalyxOS is responding by
pausing all releases — and security updates — while its release process,
signing keys, and security protocols are reworked. The result will be no
updates for “four to six months“. The project is recommending that
its users “should uninstall the OS” and wait for an all-clear
signal. CalyxOS may have its work cut out for it when the time comes to
try to convince those users to come back.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032612/

By some appearances, at least, the kernel community has been relatively
insulated from the onslaught of AI-driven software-development tools.
There has not been a flood of vibe-coded memory-management patches — yet.
But kernel development is, in the end, software development, and these
tools threaten to change many aspects of how software development is done.
In a world where companies are actively pushing their developers to use
these tools, it is not surprising that the topic is increasingly prominent
in kernel circles as well. There are currently a number of ongoing
discussions about how tools based on large language models (LLMs) fit into
the kernel-development community.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032016/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Don’t fear the TPM; Python performance; Offensive Debian packages; NNCPNET; 6.17 Merge window; Transparent huge pages; SilverBullet.
• Briefs: AUR malware; Secure boot; kbuild and kconfig maintenanec; GPU drivers; NVIDIA on AlmaLinux; Proxmox 9.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032744/

Daniel Almeida continues
his look at graphics drivers on the Collabora blog.

The starting point is to understand that a kernel-mode GPU driver
connects a much larger UMD (user-mode driver) to the actual
GPU. The UMD will actually implement APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL,
OpenCL, and others. These APIs, in turn, will be used by actual
programs to describe their workload to the GPU. This includes
allocating and using not only the geometry and textures, but also
the shaders being used to process said data into the final
result. This means that a key aspect of GPU drivers is actually
allocating GPU memory to house data related to the current scene
being drawn so that it can actually be operated on by the hardware.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032722/

For eight years, Masahiro Yamada has been the sole maintainer of the
kernel’s build and configuration systems — two complex pieces of
infrastructure that many people interact with, but few truly understand.
Yamada has just stepped
down from that position. Maintenance of the build system will be taken
up by Nathan Chancellor and Nicolas Schier (in the “odd fixes” capacity),
while the configuration system is now entirely unmaintained.

Thanks are due to Yamada for all that work, and to Chancellor and Schier
for stepping up. Hopefully a way will be found to better support these
important subsystems in the near future.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032199/

The use of huge pages can significantly increase the performance of many
workloads by reducing both memory-management overhead in the kernel and
pressure on the system’s translation lookaside buffer (TLB). The addition
of transparent huge pages (THP) for the 2.6.38 kernel release in 2011
caused the kernel to allocate huge pages automatically to make their
benefits available to all workloads without any effort needed on the
user-space side. But it turns out that use of huge pages can make some
workloads slower as the result of internal memory fragmentation, so the THP
feature is often disabled. Two patch sets aimed at better targeting the
use of transparent huge pages are currently working their way through the
review process.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032603/

The call for topics for
the 2025 Maintainers Summit has been posted. The Summit, to be held in
Tokyo on December 10, will involve around 30 developers gathered to
discuss development-process issues for the kernel. Anybody who is
interested in attending is encouraged to post a nomination along with the
topic they would like to discuss. Nominations and topics are best sent
before September 10.

The call for topics for the Kernel Summit, which runs as a Linux Plumbers Conference track, is also
out.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032582/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python-requests), Fedora (mingw-libxslt), Red Hat (gdk-pixbuf2, jq, kernel, mod_security, ncurses, nodejs:22, opentelemetry-collector, python-setuptools, python3-setuptools, python3.12-setuptools, qt5-qt3d, redis, redis:6, redis:7, sqlite, and unbound), SUSE (apache2, cairo, chromium, djvulibre, govulncheck-vulndb, grub2, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, liblua5_5-5, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, python, python310, python314, python39, redis, sqlite3, and systemd), and Ubuntu (apport, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-azure, and linux-oracle).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032090/

Matthew Garrett has posted a detailed followup to
our recent article on the coming
expiration if Microsoft’s Secure Boot signing key.

The upshot is that nobody actually enforces these expiry dates – here’s
the reference code that disables it. In a year’s time we’ll
have gone past the expiration date for ‘Microsoft Windows UEFI
Driver Publisher’ and everything will still be working, and a few
months later ‘Microsoft Windows Production PCA 2011’ will also
expire and systems will keep booting Windows despite being signed
with a now-expired certificate. This isn’t a Y2K scenario where
everything keeps working because people have done a huge amount of
work – it’s a situation where everything keeps working even if
nobody does any work.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031713/

As of this writing, just over 4,000 non-merge changesets have been pulled
into the mainline repository during the 6.17 merge window. When he announced
the merge-window opening, Linus Torvalds let it be known that, due to a
busy personal schedule, he was likely to pull changes more quickly than
usual this time around; that has been borne out to some extent. Changes
merged so far are focused on core-kernel and filesystem work; read on for
the details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031201/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Becoming a Python contributor; Graphene OS; Fedora quality team; 6.16 Development statistics; Proxy execution; Run-time verification; Confidential VMs.
• Briefs: HeliumOS 10; European Tech Funding; GNU C Library 2.42; OpenPrinting; Wayback 0.1
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030842/

Priority inversion comes about when a low-priority task holds a resource
that is also needed by a high-priority task, preventing the latter from
running. This problem is made much worse if the low-priority task is
unable to gain access to the CPU and, as a result, cannot complete its work
and free the resources it holds. Proxy execution is a potential solution
to this problem, but it is a complex solution that has been under
development for several years; LWN first looked
at it in 2020. The 6.17 kernel is likely to contain an important step
forward for this long-running project.