All posts by corbet

Kernel prepatch 6.14-rc1

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.

GNU Binutils 2.44 Released

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.

The Linux Foundation on global regulations and sanctions

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.

[$] Resistance to Rust abstractions for DMA mapping

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.

LWN in EPUB format

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006562/

For years we have had occasional requests to be able to receive LWN in
a format for ebook readers. It took a while, but we are now happy to
announce that all of LWN’s feature content is available, to subscribers at
the “professional hacker” level and above, in the EPUB format. To obtain
the weekly edition as an EPUB file, just click the “Download EPUB” link in
the left column. There is a separate RSS feed
for the EPUB format as well. Any other feature content can be turned into
an ebook by appending /epub to its URL.

We will also be creating special EPUB books at times. As an example of
what is possible, our complete coverage from Kangrejos 2024 and the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory Management, and BPF Summit
are available to all readers.

There are surely places where our EPUB books can be improved; please feel
free to drop us a note (at [email protected]) with suggestions.

Linux-related discussion as a cybersecurity threat

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006328/

The DistroWatch
January 27 edition
includes this interesting tidbit:

Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook’s internal policy makers
decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with
Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”. Any posts mentioning
DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux
discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts
removed.

We’ve been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer
post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some
people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for
posting about Linux.

One can only hope that this is a mistake that will be resolved soon.

The trouble with the new uretprobes

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005662/

A “uretprobe” is a dynamic, user-space tracepoint injected by the kernel
into a running process; this document
tersely describes their use. Among other things, uretprobes are used by
the perf utility to time function calls. The 6.11 kernel saw a
significant change to uretprobes that improved their performance, but that
change is also creating trouble for some users. The best way to solve the
problem is not entirely clear.

The first part of the 6.14 merge window

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005651/

As of this writing, just over 4,300 non-merge changesets have been pulled
into the mainline repository for the 6.14 release. Many of the pull
requests this time around include remarks saying that activity has been
relatively low this time around, presumably due to the holidays. So those
4,300 changesets are probably closer to the merge-window halfway point than
usual. Much of the work merged thus far looks more like incremental
improvements than major new initiatives, but there still have been a number
of interesting changes in the mix.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005708/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (libebml, poco, redis, sympa, tiff, and ucf), Fedora (rsync), Mageia (dcmtk, git, proftpd, and raptor2), Red Hat (grafana, iperf3, kernel, microcode_ctl, and redis), SUSE (chromium, dhcp, git, libqt5-qtwebkit, and pam_u2f), and Ubuntu (python3.10, python3.8 and python3.12).

Development statistics for 6.13

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004998/

The 6.13 development cycle ended on January 19 with the release
of the 6.13 kernel. This cycle was, on its surface, one of the slowest we
have seen in some time; the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.13 page
can be consulted for a refresher on all it contains. Here, instead, we
will take our usual look at where all of those changes came from.

The 6.13 kernel has been released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005488/

Linus has released
the 6.13 kernel
. “So nothing horrible or unexpected happened last
week, so I’ve tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release
.”

Significant features in this release include
the lazy preemption model for CPU
scheduling,
Arm64 Guarded
Control Stack
support,
the PIDFD_GET_INFO() operation,
multi-grain
file timestamps
,
beginning atomic write support for the ext4
and XFS filesystems,
the setxattrat(), getxattrat(), listxattrat(),
and removexattrat() system calls,
private
stacks
for BPF programs,
a
new mechanism
for adding guard pages to a memory mapping,
the removal of the reiserfs filesystem,
and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.13 page
for more information.