Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007000/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007887/
Version
135.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Changes include
more languages for the translations feature, increasing roll-out of the
credit-card autofill and AI chatbot features, and (perhaps most welcome):
Firefox now includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the
history API by generating excessive history entries, which can make
navigating with the back and forward buttons difficult by
cluttering the history. This intervention ensures that such
entries, unless interacted with by the user, are skipped when using
the back and forward buttons.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007886/
Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-17), Fedora (chromium, fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libxml2 and redis), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good), Red Hat (buildah, bzip2, galera, mariadb, grafana, keepalived, libsoup, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-glib2, podman, python-jinja2, and rsync), SUSE (bind, ignition, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, krb5, libxml2, openssl-1_1, orc, python-asteval, rsync, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz, libndp, libvpx, and opencv).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006378/
By the time that Linus Torvalds released
6.14-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle, some
9,307 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline
repository — the lowest level of merge-window activity seen in years.
There were, nonetheless, a number of interesting changes in the
5,000 commits pulled since the
first-half merge-window summary was written.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007547/
Linus has released 6.14-rc1 and closed the
merge window for this release.
This is actually a _tiny_ merge window, and that’s ok. The holidays
clearly meant that people did less development than during a normal
cycle, and that then shows up as a much smaller-than-average
release. I really felt like this year we got the whole holiday
season release timing right, and this is just another sign of that.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007541/
Version 2.44 of the GNU Binutils package has been released. Perhaps the
most significant change is the absence of the “gold” linker, which is
deprecated and about to disappear entirely. Gold appeared in 2008 with some fanfare as a faster
linker, but it has suffered from a lack of maintenance in recent years.
This release also includes some architecture-specific assembler
improvements, and some (non-gold) linker enhancements.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007272/
The Linux Foundation has published its
long-awaited article on international sanctions and open-source
development. This is the reasoning that went into the removal of a group of Russian kernel
maintainers in October.
It is disappointing that the open source community cannot operate
independently of international sanctions programs, but these
sanctions are the law of each country and are not optional. Many
developers work on open source projects in their spare time, or for
fun. Dealing with U.S. and international sanctions was unlikely on
the list of things that most (or very likely any) open source
developers thought they were signing up for. We hope that in time
relevant authorities will clarify that open source and standards
activities may continue unabated. Until that time, however, with
the direct and indirect sponsorship of developers by companies, the
intersection of sanctions on corporate entities leaves us in a
place where we cannot ignore the potential risks.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006805/
While the path toward the ability to write device drivers in Rust has been
anything but smooth, steady progress has been made and that goal is close
to being achieved — for some types of drivers at least. Device drivers
need to be able to set up memory areas for direct memory access (DMA)
transfers, though; that means Rust drivers will need a set of
abstractions to interface with the kernel’s DMA-mapping subsystem. Those
abstractions have run into resistance that has the potential to block
progress on the Rust-for-Linux project as a whole.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007024/
Version 2.41 of the GNU
C Library has been released. Changes include a number of test-suite
improvements, strict-error support in the DNS stub resolver, wrappers for
the the sched_setattr()
and sched_getattr() system calls,
Unicode 16.0.0 support,
improved C23 support,
support for extensible restartable
sequences,
Guarded Control Stack support on 64-bit Arm systems,
and more.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005953/
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006562/
For years we have had occasional requests to be able to receive LWN in
a format for ebook readers. It took a while, but we are now happy to
announce that all of LWN’s feature content is available, to subscribers at
the “professional hacker” level and above, in the EPUB format. To obtain
the weekly edition as an EPUB file, just click the “Download EPUB” link in
the left column. There is a separate RSS feed
for the EPUB format as well. Any other feature content can be turned into
an ebook by appending /epub to its URL.
We will also be creating special EPUB books at times. As an example of
what is possible, our complete coverage from Kangrejos 2024 and the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory Management, and BPF Summit are available to all readers.
There are surely places where our EPUB books can be improved; please feel
free to drop us a note (at [email protected]) with suggestions.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006486/
Security updates have been issued by Debian (git and openjpeg2), Mageia (virtualbox), SUSE (podman), and Ubuntu (clamav, frr, libreoffice, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and quagga).
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:
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005801/
Version
10.0 of the Wine Windows compatibility layer is out. “This release
“. Those changes include full support for the Arm64EC
represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual
changes
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).