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.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005562/

Version 16.1 of the GDB debugger is out. There are a lot of changes,
including watchpoints for tagged data pointers, a new script to print the
stack trace of a running process, better Intel Processor Trace support, and
more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005445/

A reminder has gone out that the deadline for proposals for the 2025 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF Summit is February 1;
anybody wanting to attend will need to make themselves known before then.
The reminder also says that there will be no remote participation option
(or live streams) this year.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005222/

The kernel is, on its face, a single large development project, but
internally it is better viewed as 100 or so semi-independent projects all
crammed into one big tent. Within those projects, there is a fair amount
of latitude about how changes are managed, and some subsystems are using
that freedom in the search for more efficient ways of working. In the end,
though, all of these sub-projects have to work together and interface with
kernel-wide efforts, including the stable-release and CVE-assignment
processes. For some time, there has been friction between the direct
rendering (DRM, or graphics) subsystem and the stable maintainers; that
friction recently burst into view in a way that shows some of the
limitations of how the kernel community manages patches.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004544/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Chimera Linux; Vim; Page-table hardening; Modifying system calls; Ghostty 1.0; TuxFamily.
• Briefs: rsync vulnerabilities; Linux Mint 22.1; Git v2.48.9; Libvirt v11.0.0; Rust 1.84.0; RIP Helen Borrie, Paolo Mantegazza, and Bill Gianopoulos; SFC lawsuit; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004455/

The ptrace()
system call allows a suitably privileged process to modify another in a
large number of ways. Among other things, ptrace() can intercept
system calls and make changes to them, but such operations can be fiddly
and architecture-dependent. This patch series from
Dmitry Levin seeks to improve that situation by adding a new
ptrace() operation to make changes to another process’s system
calls in an architecture-independent manner.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005076/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, NetworkManager, and thunderbird), Fedora (golang-github-aws-sdk-2, golang-github-aws-smithy, golang-github-ncw-swift-2, rclone, and thunderbird), Mageia (ceph, firefox, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, NetworkManager, and thunderbird), Red Hat (fence-agents and raptor2), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, frr, grafana, operator-sdk, perl-Module-ScanDeps, proftpd, python311-mistune, redis, thunderbird, valkey, and yq), and Ubuntu (hplip and webkit2gtk).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004878/

Linus has released 6.13-rc7 for testing.
“So unless something odd happens the upcoming week, I expect to release
a final 6.13 next week as per the normal schedule“. Read the full
announcement for your details on how to get a free guitar pedal assembled
by Linus himself.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004774/

We have just now received word of the
passing of Paolo Mantegazza, the driving force behind the Real Time Application Interface project
and a key figure in the development of realtime Linux.

Paolo used to describe himself as a simple practitioner of software
development, one of whose missions was to contribute a free
real-time system his students could use, study and improve for
their research work at the university, welcoming others to
join. Many Linux users and businesses owe him a lot, because under
his leadership, the RTAI project has always defended the freedom of
developers to implement real-time systems, particularly at times
when it was threatened. His fierce will for RTAI served the Xenomai
project, as well as others.

He will be missed.
(LWN interviewed Mantegazza in
2001).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004614/

Version
1.84.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include
improved version selection for dependencies in Cargo, the beginning of the
migration to a new trait solver, and some updated pointer-provenance APIs.

Most of the time, programmers do not need to worry much about
provenance, and it is very clear how a pointer got
derived. However, when casting pointers to integers and back, the
provenance of the resulting pointer is underspecified. With this
release, Rust is adding a set of APIs that can in many cases
replace the use of integer-pointer-casts, and therefore avoid the
ambiguities inherent to such casts. In particular, the pattern of
using the lowest bits of an aligned pointer to store extra
information can now be implemented without ever casting a pointer
to an integer or back. This makes the code easier to reason about,
easier to analyze for the compiler, and also benefits tools like
Miri and architectures like CHERI that aim to detect and diagnose
pointer misuse.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004595/

The Software Freedom Conservancy is reporting
that AVM has released the full source and installation scripts for its
routers in response to a lawsuit, filed by Sebastian Steck, based on Lesser
GNU Public License rights.

Historically, lawsuits have focused on the copyrights licensed
under GPL (or the GPL and LGPL together). Steck’s lawsuit uniquely
focused exclusively on users’ rights under the LGPL. Steck’s work
showed that despite being a “Lesser” license than GPL, LGPLv2.1
still guarantees users the right to repair, modify and reinstall
modified versions of the software on their device. There is now no
doubt that both GPL and LGPL mandate the device owner’s ability to
make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes
persist across reboots.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004029/

Attacks on the kernel can take many forms; one popular exploitation path is
to find a way to overwrite some memory with attacker-supplied data. If the
right memory can be targeted, one well-targeted stray write is all that is
needed to take control of the system. Since the system’s page tables
regulate access to memory, they are an attractive target for this type of
attack. This patch
set from Kevin Brodsky is an attempt to protect page tables (and,
eventually, other data structures) using the “memory protection keys”
feature provided by a number of CPU architectures.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003479/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 9, 2025 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004376/

Kernel networking maintainer Jakub Kicinski reviews progress in
the networking subsystem in 2024.

Work on relieving the rtnl_lock pressure has continued throughout
the year. The rtnl_lock is often mentioned as one of the biggest
global locks in the kernel, as it protects all of the network
configuration and state. The efforts can be divided into two broad
categories – converting read operations to rely on RCU protection
or other fine grained locking (v6.9, v6.10), and splitting the lock
into per-network namespace locks (preparations for which started in
v6.13).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004339/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python-requests), Oracle (python-requests), SUSE (python-Jinja2 and rizin), and Ubuntu (ceph, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe,
linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15,
linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-intel-iotg, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi-5.4, and salt).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004297/

From the Ubuntu Discourse instance comes the
sad news that longtime Debian and Ubuntu contributor Steve Langasek has
passed away.

Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but
remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration. Judging by the
outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned
by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in
particular in Ubuntu and Debian where he was a great mind, mentor
and conscience.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004230/

Linus has released 6.13-rc6 for testing.

So we had a slight pickup in commits this last week, but as
expected and hoped for, things were still pretty quiet. About twice
as many commits as the holiday week, but that’s still not all that
many.

I expect things will start becoming more normal now that people are
back from the holidays and are starting to recover and wake up from
their food comas.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003780/

We are reliably informed by the calendar that yet another year has begun.
That can only mean one thing: the time has come to go out on a limb with a
series of ill-advised predictions that are almost certainly not how
the year will actually go. We have to try; it’s traditional, after all.
Read on for our view of what’s coming and how it may play out.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003916/

While some people are focused on new and trendy languages, José Marchesi
has, instead, gifted the world with a GCC front
end for the Algol 68 language.

This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating,
generally poorly understood and often vilified programming
language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of
its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the
language well will suspect this probably still holds true today,
but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised
Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we
shall see.

For those who see Algol 68 as too new, there was also a
COBOL front end posted in December.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003862/

Version 22.1 of the
Android-based LineageOS distribution is out.

We’ve been hard at work since Android 15’s release in September,
adapting our unique features to this new version of
Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the
hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s
UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to
rebase onto Android 15’s code-base faster than anticipated.

Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a
device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more
devices are ready on day one that we’d typically expect to have up
this early in the cycle!

Last, but not least, we even had enough time and resources to
introduce not one, but two new exciting apps! The first one,
Twelve, will replace our aging music app, while the other one,
Camelot, will let you view PDF files.