Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029093/

Decades after its creation, the Linux CPU scheduler remains an area
of active development; it is difficult to find a time slice to cover every
interesting scheduler change. In an attempt to catch up, the time has come
to round-robin through a few patches that have been circulating recently.
The work at hand focuses on a new attempt at time-slice extension, the
creation of a deadline server for sched_ext tasks, and keeping tasks on
isolated CPUs from being surprised by LRU batching.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029426/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Python JIT; Anubis; Secure Boot certificate expiration; SFrame; Exported symbols; Python packaging in Fedora.
• Briefs: Parrot 6.4; SPI report; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030177/

Version 0.50.0 of Hyprland, a compositor for Wayland, has been
released. Changes include a new render-scheduling option that “can
drastically improve FPS on underpowered devices, while coming at no
performance or latency cost when the system is doing alright“, an
option to exclude applications from screen sharing, a new test suite, and
more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030106/

Security updates have been issued by Oracle (cloud-init, emacs, firefox, glib2, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, lz4, python-setuptools, python3.11-setuptools, python3.12-setuptools, and socat), Red Hat (fence-agents, glib2, glibc, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, python-setuptools, python3.11-setuptools, and python3.12-setuptools), Slackware (libxml2), SUSE (glib2, gpg2, kernel, libxml2, poppler, rmt-server, runc, stalld, and xen), and Ubuntu (jpeg-xl).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029943/

Software in the Public Interest has released
its annual report for 2024. It includes reports from the long list of
projects housed under the SPI umbrella, but the financial statements are
not included at this time.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029492/

Loadable kernel modules require access to kernel data structures and
functions to get their job done; the kernel provides this access by way of
exported symbols. Almost since this mechanism was created, there have been
debates over which symbols should be exported, and how. The 6.16 kernel
gained a new export mechanism that limits access to symbols to specific
kernel modules. That code is likely to change soon, but the addition
of an enforcement mechanism has since been backed out.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029919/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg), Fedora (gnutls, linux-firmware, mingw-djvulibre, mingw-python-requests, and salt), Mageia (qtimageformats6), Oracle (gnome-remote-desktop, golang, kernel, libxml2, and perl-File-Find-Rule), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, kernel, and protobuf), and Ubuntu (apport, glibc, gnutls28, and roundcube).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029857/

Parrot is a Debian-based
distribution with an emphasis on security improvement and tools; the 6.4
release is now available. “Many tools, like Metasploit, Sliver,
Caido and Empire received important updates, the Linux kernel was updated
to a more recent version, and the latest LTS version of Firefox was
provided with all our privacy oriented patches.“.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029837/

The 6.12.38, 6.6.98, 6.1.145, and 5.15.188 stable kernel updates have been
released, each contains a single AMD-related fix. “Only users of AMD
x86-based processors need to upgrade, all others may skip this
release“.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029716/

Linus has released 6.16-rc6 for testing;
it includes a fix for a somewhat scary regression that came up over the
week.

So I was flailing around blaming everybody and their pet hamster,
because for a while it looked like a drm issue and then a netlink
problem (it superficially coincided with separate issues with both
of those subsystems).

But I did eventually figure out how to trigger it reliably and then
it bisected nicely, and a couple of days have passed, and I’m
feeling much better about the release again. We’re back on track,
and despite that little scare, I think we’re in good shape.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029189/

The kernel’s perf
events subsystem can produce high-quality profiles, with full
function-call chains, of resource usage
within the kernel itself. Developers, however, often would like to see
profiles of the whole system in one integrated report with, for example,
call-stack information that crosses the boundary between the kernel and
user space. Support for unwinding user-space call stacks in the perf
events subsystem is currently inefficient at best. A long-running effort
to provide reliable, user-space call-stack unwinding within the kernel,
which will improve that situation considerably, appears to be reaching
fruition.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028368/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Python packaging; Kernel API specification; Kselftests and KUnit; niri; pedalboard.
• Briefs: Git security fixes; Amarok 3.3; Bash 5.3; Thunderbird 140; tmux-rs; U-Boot 2025.07; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029182/

Versions v2.43.7, v2.44.4, v2.45.4, v2.46.4, v2.47.3, v2.48.2, v2.49.1 and
v2.50.1 of the Git source-code management system have been released.
“This is a set of coordinated security fix releases. Please update at
your earliest convenience“. See the announcement for details;
many of the vulnerabilities have to do with tricks buried in untrusted
repositories.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029077/

The kernel project, for many years, lacked a formal testing setup; it was
often joked that testing was the project’s main reason for keeping users
around. While many types of kernel testing can only be done in the
presence of specific hardware, there are other parts of the kernel
that could be more widely tested. Over time, though, the kernel has gained
two separate testing frameworks and a growing body of automated tests to go
with them. These two frameworks — kselftests and KUnit — take different
approaches to the testing problem; now this
patch series from Thomas Weißschuh aims to bring them together.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1029150/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (djvulibre and slurm-wlm), Red Hat (apache-commons-vfs, container-tools:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt, podman, python3, rsync, socat, and sudo), SUSE (apache2, helm-mirror, incus, kernel, openssl-3, python-Django, and systemd), and Ubuntu (dcmtk, File::Find::Rule, ghostscript, jquery, and libssh).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028843/

The 6.16-rc5 kernel prepatch has been
released. Quoth Linus: “Please keep testing, but this all feels fairly
regular for this phase of the release“.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028826/

The
6.15.5,
6.12.36,
6.6.96, and
6.1.143
stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important
fixes.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1027811/

The kernel project makes a strong promise to its users: the kernel ABI will
not be changed in ways that break user-space code. The occasional failure
notwithstanding, kernel developers do try to live up to that promise. They
are handicapped by one little problem, though: there is no description of
what the kernel ABI is, and no comprehensive way to test whether a given
change breaks it. The kernel API
specification framework proposed (in its second revision) by Sasha
Levin addresses some of those concerns, but the solution is incomplete and
does not come for free.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026982/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Kernel features from Python; i686 in Fedora; Kernel development with LLMs; Rust drivers; Load balancing with machine learning; Transparent huge pages.
• Briefs: Bcachefs removal; Coccinelle for Rust; Netdev Foundation; Oracle Linux 10; GNU HHIS 5.0; Rust 1.88.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1028209/

The Netdev
Foundation, which is “a user-led effort under the supervision of the
Linux Foundation, focused on financially supporting Linux networking
development“, has announced its
existence.

The initial motivation was to move the NIPA testing outside of
Meta, so that more people can help and contribute. But there
should be sufficient budget to sponsor more projects.

(NIPA is Netdev
Infrastructure for Patch Automation).