Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003856/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (debootstrap) and SUSE (assimp-devel, grpc, libQt6Pdf6, and poppler).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003797/

Kees Cook describes
his work resulting in a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the
same first 12 characters as the initial commit in the kernel’s repository.

This is not yet in the upstream Linux tree, for fear of breaking
countless other tools out in the wild. But it can serve as a test
commit for those that want to get this fixed ahead of any future
collisions (or this commit actually landing).

LWN looked at commit-ID collisions a few
weeks back.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003059/

The origins of the TCP and UDP network protocols can be traced back a full
50 years. Even though networks and their use have changed radically
since those protocols were designed, they can still be found behind most
networking applications. Unsurprisingly, these protocols are not optimal
for all situations, so there is ongoing interest in the development of
alternatives. One such is the Homa
transport protocol, developed by John Ousterhout (of Tcl/Tk and Raft fame, among other accomplishments),
which is aimed at data-center applications. Ousterhout is currently trying
to get a
minimal Homa implementation into the kernel.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003730/

The 6.13-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. Linus says: “It’s been another week, but I’m happy to report
that clearly most people actually seem to have been enjoying the holidays,
because rc5 is tiny“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002827/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 26, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002368/

It is often said that the definition of insanity is repeating the same
action and expecting different results. Be that as it may, LWN has
repeatedly started a new year with a set of predictions, only to have to
review how badly they went at the end. There was no break in that pattern
this year, so there is no help for it; the time has come to review
our 2024 predictions in the hope that they
came out better this time around.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003381/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, edk2:20240524, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, libsndfile:1.0.31, mpg123:1.32.9, pam, php:8.1, php:8.2, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.9:3.9.21, skopeo, and unbound:1.16.2), Debian (intel-microcode), Fedora (python3-docs and python3.12), Mageia (emacs), Red Hat (podman), and SUSE (gdb, govulncheck-vulndb, libparaview5_12, mozjs115, mozjs78, and vhostmd).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003223/

Linus has released 6.13-rc4 for testing.
“So this definitely is looking a bit smaller than most rc4s, and I
expect (and hope) that rc5 will be absolutely tiny because you should
all already be relaxing over the xmas holidays.

But hey, if somebody is out there keeping the lights on, please do
keep testing.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003161/

Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg announces
that the curl project will be dropping hyper, its experimental HTTP backend
written in Rust, due to lack of developer interest.

While the experiment itself is deemed a failure, I think we learned
from it and improved curl in the process. We had to rethink and
reassess several implementation details when we aligned HTTP
behavior with hyper. libcurl parses and handles HTTP stricter
now. Better.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002371/

Back in 2022, Josh Triplett presented a
plan to implement a “spawn new process” functionality in the io_uring
subsystem. There was a fair amount of interest at the time, but developers
got distracted, and the work did not progress. Now, Gabriel Krisman
Bertazi has returned with a patch series
updating and improving Triplett’s work. While interest in this
functionality remains, it may still take some time before it is ready for
merging into the mainline.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1001869/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 19, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002498/

Version
2024.4 of the Kali Linux penetration-testing distribution has been
released. Changes include a switch to Python 3.12, the removal of i386
kernel support, GNOME 47, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002496/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gstreamer1.0), Fedora (jupyterlab and python-notebook), Oracle (gimp:2.8.22, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, php:8.2, postgresql, and python3.11), SUSE (aws-iam-authenticator, firefox, installation-images, kernel, libaom, libyuv, libsoup, libsoup2, python-aiohttp, socat, thunderbird, and vim), and Ubuntu (curl, Docker, imagemagick, and kernel).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002251/

Linus has released 6.13-rc3 for testing.
“Earlier this week it felt to me like things might have already started
to quiet down in prep for the holidays, but doing the statistics on rc3
that doesn’t actually seem to be the case – this looks very regular both in
number of commits and in diff size“.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002245/

Version 4.20
of the Xfce desktop environment has been released. “The major focus
during this development cycle was the preparation of the codebase to be
ready for Wayland“. See the Xfce 4.20 tour for an
overview of the changes in this release.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1002175/

The
6.12.5,
6.6.66,
6.1.120,
5.15.174,
5.10.231, and
5.4.287
stable kernels have all been released; each contains a relatively large set
of important fixes.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1001526/

Commits in the Git source-code management system are identified by the
SHA-1 hash of their contents — though the specific hash may change someday. The full hash is a
160-bit quantity, normally written as a 40-character hexadecimal string.
While those strings are convenient for computers to work with, humans find
them to be a bit unwieldy, so it is common to abbreviate the hash values to
shorter strings. Geert Uytterhoeven recently proposed
increasing the length of those abbreviated hashes as used in the kernel
community, but the problem he was working to solve may not be as urgent as
it seems.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1000933/

The release of the 4.19.325 stable
kernel update on December 5 marked the end of an era of sorts.
This kernel had been supported for just over six years since its initial
release in October 2018; over that time, 325 updates were released,
adding 30,109 fixes. Few Linux kernels receive public support for so long;
it is worth taking a look at this kernel’s history to see how it played
out.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1001657/

Systemd 257 has been released. As usual, the list of changes is long; it
includes support for multipath TCP in socket units, the ability to run
processes as init in their own PID namespace, a new tool for signing EFI
binaries for secure boot,
and a superhero emoji in the run0 shell prompt, among many other things.
Also, support for version-1 control groups has been disabled and requires
an elaborate dance to re-enable; it will be removed entirely in the next
release, along with support for System V service scripts.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1001599/

Version
1.0.0 of the GNU Shepherd service manager has been released after a
mere 21 years of development.

This 1.0.0 release is published today because we think Shepherd has
become a solid tool, meeting user experience standards one has come
to expect since systemd changed the game of free init systems and
service managers alike. It’s also a major milestone for Guix, which
has been relying on the Shepherd from a time when doing so counted
as dogfooding.