Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006328/

The DistroWatch
January 27 edition includes this interesting tidbit:

Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook’s internal policy makers
decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with
Linux as being “cybersecurity threats”. Any posts mentioning
DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux
discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts
removed.

We’ve been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer
post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some
people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for
posting about Linux.

One can only hope that this is a mistake that will be resolved soon.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005662/

A “uretprobe” is a dynamic, user-space tracepoint injected by the kernel
into a running process; this document
tersely describes their use. Among other things, uretprobes are used by
the perf utility to time function calls. The 6.11 kernel saw a
significant change to uretprobes that improved their performance, but that
change is also creating trouble for some users. The best way to solve the
problem is not entirely clear.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005651/

As of this writing, just over 4,300 non-merge changesets have been pulled
into the mainline repository for the 6.14 release. Many of the pull
requests this time around include remarks saying that activity has been
relatively low this time around, presumably due to the holidays. So those
4,300 changesets are probably closer to the merge-window halfway point than
usual. Much of the work merged thus far looks more like incremental
improvements than major new initiatives, but there still have been a number
of interesting changes in the mix.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005296/

Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Rsync vulnerability; Going mouseless; Commit IDs; 6.13 Development statistics; Python string formating; Python None-aware operators.
• Briefs: Kernel 6.13; Dillo 3.2.0; GDB 16.1; OpenVox; Wine 10.0; Quotes; …
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005801/

Version
10.0 of the Wine Windows compatibility layer is out. “This release
represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual
changes“. Those changes include full support for the Arm64EC
architecture, better high-DPI display support, Wayland enabled by default,
and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005710/

The series of singleton stable kernel updates continues with 6.6.73, which reverts three changes that were
causing problems for users of the overlayfs filesystem.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005708/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (libebml, poco, redis, sympa, tiff, and ucf), Fedora (rsync), Mageia (dcmtk, git, proftpd, and raptor2), Red Hat (grafana, iperf3, kernel, microcode_ctl, and redis), SUSE (chromium, dhcp, git, libqt5-qtwebkit, and pam_u2f), and Ubuntu (python3.10, python3.8 and python3.12).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004998/

The 6.13 development cycle ended on January 19 with the release
of the 6.13 kernel. This cycle was, on its surface, one of the slowest we
have seen in some time; the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.13 page
can be consulted for a refresher on all it contains. Here, instead, we
will take our usual look at where all of those changes came from.

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.