Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1032016/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
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:
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.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031813/
Version 2.42 of the GNU
C Library has been released. Changes include the addition of a number of
new math functions, support for arbitrary baud rates in the
termios.h interface, support for SFrame-based stack tracing
(described in this article), support for
memory guard pages, and a handful of
security fixes.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031812/
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freerdp, git-lfs, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, icu, ipa, iputils, krb5, libvpx, nodejs:22, osbuild-composer, perl, python-tornado, qt6-qtbase, sqlite, unbound, valkey, wireshark, and yggdrasil), Debian (libfastjson and php8.2), Fedora (glibc), Oracle (firefox, icu, perl, and unbound), Red Hat (389-ds-base, glib2, icu, libtpms, redis:6, redis:7, and yelp), SUSE (boost, forgejo-longterm, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, nginx, and salt), and Ubuntu (linux-xilinx-zynqmp, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, poppler, and sqlite3).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031161/
The 6.16 development cycle was another busy one, with 14,639 non-merge
changesets pulled into the mainline — just 18 commits short of the
total for 6.15. The 6.16 release happened
on July 27, as expected. Also as expected, LWN has put together its
traditional look at where the code for this release came from.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031536/
The good folks at Linode still have not managed to fix whatever broke in
their data center, so we are running on an emergency backup server. Things
seem to be working, but the occasional glitch is to be expected. Please
accept our apologies for the extended downtime!
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031534/
Linus has released the 6.16 kernel:
It’s Sunday afternoon, and the release cycle has come to an end. Last
week was nice and calm, and there were no big show-stopper surprises
to keep us from the regular schedule, so I’ve tagged and pushed out
6.16 as planned.
Headline changes in this release include
enabling five-level page tables by default
on x86 systems,
a number of core-dump changes including
the ability to send core dumps to a socket,
the ability to create
pipes in io_uring,
atomic-write support in the XFS
filesystem,
the elimination of block-layer bounce
buffering,
a new DMA-mapping API,
an option to block file descriptors passed
in via Unix-domain sockets,
and more.
See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1,
part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.16 page for
more information.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030004/
People tend to put a lot of trust into their phones. Those devices have
access to no end of sensitive data about our lives — our movements,
finances, communications, and more — so phones belonging to even relatively
low-profile people can be high-value targets. Android devices run free
software, at least at some levels, so it should be possible to ensure that
they are working in their owners’ interests. Off-the-shelf Android
installations tend to fall short of that goal. The GrapheneOS Android rebuild is an attempt
to improve on that situation.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030295/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1031106/
Michael Prokop has posted a
lengthy list of changes coming in the Debian “trixie” release, due in
early August. “As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to
“
be aware of, and hereby I’m starting my public notes on trixie that might
be worth for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and
looking at things from a sysadmin perspective.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030971/
Version
141.0 of the Firefox browser it out. Changes include “a local AI
” that can perform tab grouping, unit conversions in the address
model
bar, and a change that many of us will find welcome: “On Linux, Firefox
“.
uses less memory and no longer requires a forced restart after an update
has been applied by a package manager
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1030935/
Google has announced
the existence of OSS Rebuild, an infrastructure for the creation and
verification of reproducible builds of software projects.
Our aim with OSS Rebuild is to empower the security community to
deeply understand and control their supply chains by making package
consumption as transparent as using a source repository. Our
rebuild platform unlocks this transparency by utilizing a
declarative build process, build instrumentation, and network
monitoring capabilities which, within the SLSA Build framework,
produces fine-grained, durable, trustworthy security metadata. […]Our vision extends beyond any single ecosystem: We are committed to
bringing supply chain transparency and security to all open source
software development. Our initial support for the PyPI (Python),
npm (JS/TS), and Crates.io (Rust) package registries—providing
rebuild provenance for many of their most popular packages—is just
the beginning of our journey.