All posts by corbet

New restrictions on Android app sideloading

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1034989/

Google has announced
a new set of restrictions on the ability of users to install apps on their
own devices:

Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered
by verified developers in order to be installed by users on
certified Android devices. This creates crucial accountability,
making it much harder for malicious actors to quickly distribute
another harmful app after we take the first one down. Think of it
like an ID check at the airport, which confirms a traveler’s
identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags;
we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the
content of their app or where it came from.

Report: the state of commercial open source

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1034944/

The Linux Foundation, in cooperation with a couple of other groups, has announced
the publication on the intersection of businesses and commercial
open-source software (deemed “COSS”). Everything, it seems, is great, and
COSS companies make a lot of money for their investors.

Even more encouraging, COSS project communities continue along
healthy growth paths after the company receives venture funding. In
essence, highly valued COSS companies tend to cultivate more
vibrant, diverse, and integral open source ecosystems, reinforcing
the idea that business value and community value are tightly
coupled in successful COSS models.

FFmpeg 8.0 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1034813/

Version 8.0 of the FFmpeg
audio and video toolkit has been released.

Thanks to several delays, and modernization of our entire infrastructure,
this release ended up being one of our largest releases to date. In short,
its new features are:

  • Native decoders: APV, ProRes RAW, RealVideo 6.0, Sanyo LD-ADPCM, G.728
  • VVC decoder improvements: IBC, ACT, Palette Mode
  • Vulkan compute-based codecs: FFv1 (encode and decode), ProRes RAW (decode only)
  • Hardware accelerated decoding: Vulkan VP9, VAAPI VVC, OpenHarmony H264/5
  • Hardware accelerated encoding: Vulkan AV1, OpenHarmony H264/5
  • Formats: MCC, G.728, Whip, APV
  • Filters: colordetect, pad_cuda, scale_d3d11, Whisper, and others

[$] Bringing restartable sequences out of the niche

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1033955/

The restartable sequences feature, which
was added to the 4.18 kernel in 2018, exists to enable better performance
in certain types of threaded applications. While there are users for
restartable sequences, they tend to be relatively specialized code; this is
not a tool that most application developers reach for. Over time, though,
the use of restartable sequences has grown, and it looks to grow further as
the feature is tied to new capabilities provided by the kernel. As
restartable sequences become less of a niche feature, though, some problems
have turned up; fixing one of them may involve an ABI change visible in
user space.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1034402/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (golang, openjpeg2, toolbox, and xterm), Debian (libxslt, mbedtls, openjdk-17, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (apptainer, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, rust-h2, and uv), Oracle (golang, kernel, and openjpeg2), Red Hat (kernel and xterm), SUSE (389-ds, cairo, container-suseconnect, kernel, lua51-luajit, postgresql13, and trivy), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.14, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.14, linux-oracle,
linux-oracle-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime and openldap).

The State of Python 2025

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1034313/

The JetBrains blog presents the
results of the eighth annual Python Developers Survey, carried out in
partnership with the Python Software Foundation.

This year, 51% of all surveyed Python developers are involved in
data exploration and processing, with pandas and NumPy being the
tools most commonly used for this.

Many of us in the Python pundit space have talked about Python as
being divided into thirds: One-third web development, one-third
data science and pure science, and one-third as a catch-all bin.

We need to rethink that positioning now that one of those thirds is
overwhelmingly the most significant portion of Python.

[$] Kexec handover and the live update orchestrator

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.

[$] Simpler management of the huge zero folio

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.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 14, 2025

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.

Security updates for Tuesday

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).

Kernel prepatch 6.17-rc1

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.

Some turbulence at CalyxOS

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.

[$] On the use of LLM assistants for kernel development

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.