Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008399/

High-performance networking is a highly tuned activity; the amount of time
available to deal with each packet may be measured in nanoseconds, so care
must be taken to avoid anything that might slow the process down.
Recently, there has been a fair amount of attention given to a patch set
merged for 6.13 that, it is claimed, can improve processing efficiency
(and, thus, power savings)
in data centers by as much as 30%. The change itself, contributed by Joe
Damato and Martin Karsten, is a relatively small tweak to existing
optimization techniques; it shows just how much care is needed to optimize
a high-bandwidth server.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008971/

Version 6.3 of
the Plasma desktop has been released.

One year on, with the teething problems a major new release
inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma’s developers have worked
on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 —
turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone.

Changes include improved support for
drawing tablets, better fractional-scaling support, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008969/

The 6.6.77 stable kernel update has been
released; it contains a single fix for a User Mode Linux build problem.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008966/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (cacti, libtasn1-6, and rust-openssl), Oracle (galera and mariadb, kernel, raptor2, and thunderbird), SUSE (bind, fq, java-21-openj9, libtasn1-6-32bit, ovmf, python310, python312, python313, python314, rime-schema-all, thunderbird, and wget), and Ubuntu (eglibc, firefox, glibc, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, and vim).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008865/

Miguel Ojeda has announced
the posting of a
new document describing policies around the use of Rust in the Linux
kernel.

There has been a fair amount of confusion about what the kernel
policies around Rust are, who maintains what and so on. This
document tries to clarify some of these points with what, to the
best of our knowledge, is the current status.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008693/

The second 6.14 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m releasing the usual regularly
scheduled release candidate while the rest of the US is getting
ready for the biggest day in TV commercials interrupted by some
kind of lawn bowling tournament.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008641/

The
6.13.2,
6.12.13, and
6.6.76
stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important
fixes.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007947/

The BPF verifier is charged with the
challenging task of ensuring that a BPF program is safe for the kernel to
run before that program is loaded. Among many other concerns, the verifier
must ensure that any kfuncs (kernel functions that have been exported to
BPF programs) are called with the correct parameters and from the right
context. The “context” part of that enforcement is showing its age in ways
that are hurting performance; Juntong Deng has been working on
infrastructure to provide finer-grained control over when a kfunc can be
called.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008342/

Version 25.2 of the LibreOffice productivity suite is out. Changes include
the ability to remove all personal information from any document, support
for ODF version 1.4, a number of accessibility improvements, and more;
see the
release notes for details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008339/

Version
24.10.0 of the OpenWrt router-oriented distribution has been released.
Changes include an update to the 6.6 kernel, use of access control lists on
larger systems, multipath TCP support, better WiFi6 support, the
beginning of WiFi7 support, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007000/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Finding concurrency bugs with sched_ext; Rust abstractions; 6.14 Merge window; Sealed system mappings; OpenSUSE board; Julia; Site tour.
• Briefs: Binutils 2.44; Firefox 135.0; Freedesktop GitLab; GNU C Library 2.41; GTK; Servo; Thunderbird updates; Sanctions; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007887/

Version
135.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Changes include
more languages for the translations feature, increasing roll-out of the
credit-card autofill and AI chatbot features, and (perhaps most welcome):

Firefox now includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the
history API by generating excessive history entries, which can make
navigating with the back and forward buttons difficult by
cluttering the history. This intervention ensures that such
entries, unless interacted with by the user, are skipped when using
the back and forward buttons.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007886/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-17), Fedora (chromium, fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libxml2 and redis), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good), Red Hat (buildah, bzip2, galera, mariadb, grafana, keepalived, libsoup, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-glib2, podman, python-jinja2, and rsync), SUSE (bind, ignition, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, krb5, libxml2, openssl-1_1, orc, python-asteval, rsync, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz, libndp, libvpx, and opencv).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006378/

By the time that Linus Torvalds released
6.14-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle, some
9,307 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline
repository — the lowest level of merge-window activity seen in years.
There were, nonetheless, a number of interesting changes in the
5,000 commits pulled since the
first-half merge-window summary was written.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007547/

Linus has released 6.14-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this release.

This is actually a _tiny_ merge window, and that’s ok. The holidays
clearly meant that people did less development than during a normal
cycle, and that then shows up as a much smaller-than-average
release. I really felt like this year we got the whole holiday
season release timing right, and this is just another sign of that.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007541/

Version 2.44 of the GNU Binutils package has been released. Perhaps the
most significant change is the absence of the “gold” linker, which is
deprecated and about to disappear entirely. Gold appeared in 2008 with some fanfare as a faster
linker, but it has suffered from a lack of maintenance in recent years.
This release also includes some architecture-specific assembler
improvements, and some (non-gold) linker enhancements.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007438/

The
6.13.1,
6.12.12,
6.6.75,
6.1.128,
5.15.178,
5.10.234, and
5.4.290
stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of
important fixes.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007272/

The Linux Foundation has published its
long-awaited article on international sanctions and open-source
development. This is the reasoning that went into the removal of a group of Russian kernel
maintainers in October.

It is disappointing that the open source community cannot operate
independently of international sanctions programs, but these
sanctions are the law of each country and are not optional. Many
developers work on open source projects in their spare time, or for
fun. Dealing with U.S. and international sanctions was unlikely on
the list of things that most (or very likely any) open source
developers thought they were signing up for. We hope that in time
relevant authorities will clarify that open source and standards
activities may continue unabated. Until that time, however, with
the direct and indirect sponsorship of developers by companies, the
intersection of sanctions on corporate entities leaves us in a
place where we cannot ignore the potential risks.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006805/

While the path toward the ability to write device drivers in Rust has been
anything but smooth, steady progress has been made and that goal is close
to being achieved — for some types of drivers at least. Device drivers
need to be able to set up memory areas for direct memory access (DMA)
transfers, though; that means Rust drivers will need a set of
abstractions to interface with the kernel’s DMA-mapping subsystem. Those
abstractions have run into resistance that has the potential to block
progress on the Rust-for-Linux project as a whole.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007024/

Version 2.41 of the GNU
C Library has been released. Changes include a number of test-suite
improvements, strict-error support in the DNS stub resolver, wrappers for
the the sched_setattr()
and sched_getattr() system calls,
Unicode 16.0.0 support,
improved C23 support,
support for extensible restartable
sequences,
Guarded Control Stack support on 64-bit Arm systems,
and more.