All posts by corbet

Kicinski: netdev in 2024

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004376/

Kernel networking maintainer Jakub Kicinski reviews progress in
the networking subsystem in 2024.

Work on relieving the rtnl_lock pressure has continued throughout
the year. The rtnl_lock is often mentioned as one of the biggest
global locks in the kernel, as it protects all of the network
configuration and state. The efforts can be divided into two broad
categories – converting read operations to rely on RCU protection
or other fine grained locking (v6.9, v6.10), and splitting the lock
into per-network namespace locks (preparations for which started in
v6.13).

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004339/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python-requests), Oracle (python-requests), SUSE (python-Jinja2 and rizin), and Ubuntu (ceph, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe,
linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15,
linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-intel-iotg, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi-5.4, and salt).

Mourning Steve Langasek

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004297/

From the Ubuntu Discourse instance comes the
sad news that longtime Debian and Ubuntu contributor Steve Langasek has
passed away.

Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but
remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration. Judging by the
outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned
by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in
particular in Ubuntu and Debian where he was a great mind, mentor
and conscience.

Kernel prepatch 6.13-rc6

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1004230/

Linus has released 6.13-rc6 for testing.

So we had a slight pickup in commits this last week, but as
expected and hoped for, things were still pretty quiet. About twice
as many commits as the holiday week, but that’s still not all that
many.

I expect things will start becoming more normal now that people are
back from the holidays and are starting to recover and wake up from
their food comas.

[$] Some things to expect in 2025

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003780/

We are reliably informed by the calendar that yet another year has begun.
That can only mean one thing: the time has come to go out on a limb with a
series of ill-advised predictions that are almost certainly not how
the year will actually go. We have to try; it’s traditional, after all.
Read on for our view of what’s coming and how it may play out.

An Algol 68 front end for GCC

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003916/

While some people are focused on new and trendy languages, José Marchesi
has, instead, gifted the world with a GCC front
end for the Algol 68 language.

This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating,
generally poorly understood and often vilified programming
language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of
its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the
language well will suspect this probably still holds true today,
but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised
Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we
shall see.

For those who see Algol 68 as too new, there was also a
COBOL front end posted in December.

LineageOS 22.1 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1003862/

Version 22.1 of the
Android-based LineageOS distribution is out.

We’ve been hard at work since Android 15’s release in September,
adapting our unique features to this new version of
Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the
hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google’s
UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to
rebase onto Android 15’s code-base faster than anticipated.

Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a
device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more
devices are ready on day one that we’d typically expect to have up
this early in the cycle!

Last, but not least, we even had enough time and resources to
introduce not one, but two new exciting apps! The first one,
Twelve, will replace our aging music app, while the other one,
Camelot, will let you view PDF files.

Cook: Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux’s initial Git commit

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.

[$] The Homa network protocol

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.

[$] A 2024 retrospective

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.

Security updates for Tuesday

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).

Stenberg: Dropping hyper

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.

[$] Process creation in io_uring

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.