Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024494/
Linus has released 6.16-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this release.
I think we had a fairly normal merge window, although I did get the
feeling that there were a few more “late straggler” pull requests
than usual. Not to a huge degree, but there was definitely an
upward bump at the end of the second week.But on the whole, all the stats look pretty normal.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024160/
The 6.16 kernel will include a number of changes to how the kernel handles
the processing of core dumps for crashed processes. Christian Brauner explained
his reasons for doing this work as: “Because I’m a clown and also I had
“. The
it with all the CVEs because we provide a **** API for userspace
handling of core dumps has indeed been a constant source of
vulnerabilities; with luck, the 6.16 work will result in rather fewer of
them in the future.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023085/
One of the more obscure features provided by Unix-domain sockets is the
ability to pass a file descriptor from one process to another. This
feature is often used to provide access to a specific file or network
connection to a process running in a relatively unprivileged context. But
what if the recipient doesn’t want a new file descriptor? A feature
added for the 6.16 release makes it possible to refuse that offer.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022979/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023625/
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (varnish), Debian (asterisk and roundcube), Fedora (systemd), Mageia (golang), Red Hat (ghostscript, perl-CPAN, python36:3.6, and rsync), SUSE (govulncheck-vulndb, libsoup-2_4-1, and postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql17), and Ubuntu (mariadb, open-vm-tools, php-twig, and python-tornado).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023502/
Kees Cook’s “hardening
fixes” pull request for the 6.16 merge window looked like a
straightforward exercise; it only contained four commits. So just about
everybody was surprised when it resulted in Cook being temporarily blocked
from his kernel.org account among fears of malicious activity. When the
dust settled, though, the red alert was canceled. It turns out,
surprisingly, that Git is a tool with which one can inflict substantial
self-harm in a moment of inattention.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022054/
The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling
in the Linux Kernel Summit (known as “OSPM”) took place on March 18-20,
2025. Topics discussed on the third (and final) day include proxy
execution, energy-aware scheduling, the deadline scheduler, and an
evaluation of the kernel’s EEVDF scheduler.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022655/
As the end of the 1990s approached, a lot of kernel-development effort was
going into improving support for 32-bit systems
with shockingly large amounts of memory installed. This being the 1990s,
having more than 1GB of memory in such a system was deemed to be shocking.
Many of the compromises made to support such inconceivably large systems
have remained in the kernel to this day. One of those compromises —
bounce buffering of I/O requests in the block layer — has finally been
eased out for the 6.16 release, more than a quarter-century after its
introduction.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022134/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022744/
Version
10 of the AlmaLinux OS distribution has been released.
The goal of AlmaLinux OS is to support our community, and AlmaLinux
OS 10 is the best example of that yet. With an unwavering eye on
maintaining compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we
have made small improvements to AlmaLinux OS 10 that target
specific sections of our userbase.
See the
release notes for details.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022704/
Version
25.05 of the NixOS distribution has been released. Changes include
support for the COSMIC desktop environment (reviewed here in August), GNOME 48, a
6.12 kernel, and many new modules; see the
release notes for details. (Thanks to Pavel Roskin).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022703/
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libsoup, and python-tornado), Debian (libavif and pgbouncer), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (firefox, govulncheck-vulndb, and python310-setuptools), and Ubuntu (flask, intel-microcode, openjdk-17-crac, tika, and Tomcat).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022414/
The 6.14 kernel development cycle only brought in 11,003 non-merge
changesets, making it the slowest cycle since 4.0, which was released in
2015. The 6.15 kernel, instead, brought in 14,612 changesets, making it
the busiest release since 6.7, released at the beginning of 2024. The
kernel development process, in other words, is back up to full speed. The
6.15
release happened on May 25, so the time has come for the
obligatory look at where the changes in this release came from.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022457/
Linus has released the 6.15 kernel, as
expected.
So this was delayed by a couple of hours because of a last-minute
bug report resulting in one new feature being disabled at the
eleventh hour, but 6.15 is out there now.
Significant changes in 6.15 include smarter timer-ID assignment to make
checkpoint/restore operations more reliable, the ability
to read status information from a pidfd after the process in question has
been reaped, the PIDFD_SELF
special pidfd value, nested
ID-mapped mounts, zero-copy network-data reception via io_uring, The ability
to read epoll events via io_uring, resilient
queued spinlocks for BPF programs, guard-page enhancements allowing them to be
placed in file-backed memory areas and for user space to detect their
presence, the once-controversial fwctl
subsystem, the optional sealing of some
system mappings, and much more.
See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the in-progress KernelNewbies 6.15 page for
more information.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021332/
The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling
in the Linux Kernel Summit (known as “OSPM”) took place on March 18-20,
2025. Topics discussed on the second day include improvements to device
suspend and resume, the status and future of sched_ext, the scx_lavd
scheduler, improving the efficiency of load balancing, and hierarchical
constant bandwidth server scheduling.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022352/
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dotnet9.0, dropbear, ghostscript, nbdkit, openssh, python-watchfiles, rpm-ostree, yelp, yelp-xsl, and zsync), Oracle (firefox and kernel), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (aaa_glibc and mozilla), SUSE (chromedriver, open-vm-tools, postgresql14, python-cryptography, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-hwe-5.4, python, and sqlite3).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022263/
Mozilla has announced
that it is shutting down Pocket, a bookmarking service acquired by Mozilla
in 2017, this coming July. “Pocket has helped millions save articles
“
and discover stories worth reading. But the way people use the web has
evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match
their browsing habits and online needs.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022252/
Our recent article on Home Assistant
observed that the project emphasizes installations using its own Linux
distribution or within containers. The project has now made that emphasis
rather stronger with this
announcement of the deprecation of the “core” and “supervised”
installation modes, which allowed Home Assistant to be installed as an
ordinary application on a Linux system.
These are advanced installation methods, with only a small
percentage of the community opting to use them. If you are using
these methods, you can continue to do so (you can even continue to
update your system), but in six months time, you will no longer be
supported, which I’ll explain the impacts of in the next
section. References to these installation methods will be removed
from our documentation after our next release (2025.6).
Support for 32-bit Arm and x86 architectures has also been deprecated.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021258/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021812/
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, and wireless-regdb), Fedora (iputils, open-vm-tools, sfnt2woff-zopfli, and woff), Red Hat (postgresql:12), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, brltty, helm, python-maturin, and rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-fips).