All posts by corbet

Kernel prepatch 6.14-rc3

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1010232/

The 6.14-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for
testing; the announcement, for unknown reasons, went only to the
linux-btrfs list.

So the first few weeks of the 6.14 release development were
smaller-than-usual, but rc3 is actually right in line with normal
releases at this point. Probably just timing of pull requests, and
we’ll see how next week goes. But nothing looks worrisome.

Along with the usual stream of fixes, this release includes the “faux bus“, designed
for simple drivers that just need some sort of virtual bus to be associated
with; this bus come with Rust bindings from the
outset.

[$] Fighting the AI scraperbot scourge

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008897/

There are many challenges involved with running a web site like LWN. Some
of them, such as finding the courage to write for people who know more
about the subject matter than we do, simply come with the territory we have
chosen. But others show up as an unwelcome surprise; the ongoing task of
fending off bots determined to scrape the entire Internet to (seemingly)
feed into the insatiable meat grinder of AI training is certainly one of
those. Readers have, at times, expressed curiosity about that fight and
how we are handling it; read on for a description of a modern-day plague.

New leadership for Asahi Linux

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1009528/

The Asahi Linux project, which is working to support Linux on Apple
silicon, has announced the
resignation of Hector “marcan” Martin as its lead, and his replacement by a
seven-person committee. “Today’s news is bittersweet. We are grateful
to marcan for kicking off this project and tirelessly working on it these
past years. Our community will miss him. Still, with your support, the
project has a bright future to come“. Martin has explained his reasons
for leaving at length in this
blog post.

[$] Multi-size THP creation, two different ways

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1009039/

Huge pages can increase the performance of many programs, but they can also
have unfortunate performance impacts of their own. Over the last few
years, multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) have increasingly been
seen as a happy medium that bring the benefits of huge pages at a lower cost.
The system cannot benefit from mTHPs, though, if it does not create them;
two developers have independently posted patches to enable the creation of
mTHPs in the background.

Codeberg responds to hate attacks

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1009227/

The Codeberg development forge has
recently been subject to sustained attacks resulting in, among other
things, abusive email being sent to the site’s users. The organization has
now put up a
description and a defiant response:

Extreme right forces actively target members of our communities and
discriminate based on ethnicity and gender, political background,
sexual orientation, disabilities, nationality and faith. However
diversity is an important asset in free/libre software communities
and it is what makes our software great and development productive.

By targeting some of our most active translators, nicest
designers, best developers and all other motivated contributors,
they are hurting the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1009177/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (bind9, cacti, pam-pkcs11, and ruby2.7), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, crun, and java-21-openjdk), Mageia (calibre, nginx, python-ansible-core, python-jinja2, python-pip, python-setuptools, python-twisted, and python-waitress), Red Hat (doxygen, firefox, gcc, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, tbb, and thunderbird), SUSE (go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, openssl-3, ovmf, python3-numpy, python311, python36, qemu, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (bluez and openssl).

[$] Smarter IRQ suspension in the networking stack

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008399/

High-performance networking is a highly tuned activity; the amount of time
available to deal with each packet may be measured in nanoseconds, so care
must be taken to avoid anything that might slow the process down.
Recently, there has been a fair amount of attention given to a patch set
merged for 6.13 that, it is claimed, can improve processing efficiency
(and, thus, power savings)
in data centers by as much as 30%. The change itself, contributed by Joe
Damato and Martin Karsten, is a relatively small tweak to existing
optimization techniques; it shows just how much care is needed to optimize
a high-bandwidth server.

Plasma 6.3 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008971/

Version 6.3 of
the Plasma desktop has been released.

One year on, with the teething problems a major new release
inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma’s developers have worked
on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 —
turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone.

Changes include improved support for
drawing tablets, better fractional-scaling support, and more.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008966/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (cacti, libtasn1-6, and rust-openssl), Oracle (galera and mariadb, kernel, raptor2, and thunderbird), SUSE (bind, fq, java-21-openj9, libtasn1-6-32bit, ovmf, python310, python312, python313, python314, rime-schema-all, thunderbird, and wget), and Ubuntu (eglibc, firefox, glibc, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, and vim).

[$] Improved load-time checking for BPF kfuncs

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007947/

The BPF verifier is charged with the
challenging task of ensuring that a BPF program is safe for the kernel to
run before that program is loaded. Among many other concerns, the verifier
must ensure that any kfuncs (kernel functions that have been exported to
BPF programs) are called with the correct parameters and from the right
context. The “context” part of that enforcement is showing its age in ways
that are hurting performance; Juntong Deng has been working on
infrastructure to provide finer-grained control over when a kfunc can be
called.