All posts by corbet

[$] Block-layer bounce buffering bounces out of the kernel

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.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 29, 2025

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022134/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

  • Front: Glibc security; How we lost the Internet; Encrypted DNS; 6.15 Development statistics; Filesystem stress-testing; BPF verifier; Network access from BPF; OSPM 2025.
  • Briefs: AlmaLinux 10.0; FESCo decision overturned; NixOS 25.05; Pocket, Launchpad retired; Quotes; …
  • Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

AlmaLinux OS 10.0 released

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.

Security updates for Tuesday

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).

[$] Development statistics for the 6.15 kernel

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.

The 6.15 kernel has been released

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.

[$] Reports from OSPM 2025, day two

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.

Security updates for Friday

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).

Mozilla is shutting down Pocket

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.“

Home Assistant deprecates the “core” and “supervised” installation modes

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.

Security updates for Tuesday

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).

[$] Reports from OSPM 2025, day one

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020596/

The seventh edition of the Power Management and Scheduling
in the Linux Kernel (known as “OSPM”) Summit took place on March 18-20,
2025. It was organized by Juri Lelli, Frauke Jäger, Tommaso Cucinotta, and
Lorenzo Pieralisi, and was hosted by Linutronix at Alte Fabrik,
Uhldingen-Mühlhofen, Germany. The event was sponsored by Linutronix, Arm,
and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa.

Security updates for Monday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021740/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dropbear, firefox-esr, intel-microcode, net-tools, openafs, thunderbird, and xrdp), Fedora (chromium, micropython, syslog-ng, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (dropbear and openssh), Oracle (.NET 9.0, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, git-lfs, grafana, kernel, and osbuild and osbuild-composer), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (cargo-c, gimp, iputils-20240905, kernel, libraw, microcode_ctl, openssh, pnpm, python311-cramjam, python311-httptools, python311-jwcrypto, python311-loguru, python311-mechanize, python311-nltk, python311-oauthlib, python311-py7zr, python311-pycapnp, python311-pyspnego, python311-pywayland, python311-suds, python311-treq, python311-ujson, python311-waitress, ruby3.4-rubygem-actionmailer, ruby3.4-rubygem-actiontext, ruby3.4-rubygem-activerecord, ruby3.4-rubygem-activestorage, ruby3.4-rubygem-fluentd, ruby3.4-rubygem-globalid, ruby3.4-rubygem-jquery-rails, ruby3.4-rubygem-kramdown, ruby3.4-rubygem-loofah, ruby3.4-rubygem-multi_xml, ruby3.4-rubygem-puma, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails, ruby3.4-rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer, ruby3.4-rubygem-sprockets, ruby3.4-rubygem-web-console, ruby3.4-rubygem-websocket-extensions, ucode-intel-20250512, and valkey), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet9, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency,
linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-oracle, linux, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg,
linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia,
linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-fips, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-fips, linux-gke, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

[$] A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: case studies

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1017945/

The first article in this series provided
an overview of Home Assistant,
its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on
descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant,
though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In
this closing article, we’ll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve
some real problems.

In Memoriam: John L. Young (EFF)

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021462/

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a somewhat belated memorial
for John Young, the founder of Cryptome.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital
age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help
democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being
and nurtured it for many years. We will miss him and his
unswerving commitment to the public’s right to know.