All posts by corbet

Rust 1.83.0 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1000273/

Version
1.83.0 of the Rust language has been released.

This release includes several large extensions to what code running
in const contexts can do. This refers to all code that the
compiler has to evaluate at compile-time: the initial value of
const and static items, array lengths, enum
discriminant values, const generic arguments, and functions
callable from such contexts (const fn).

There are also quite a few new stabilized APIs.

The OpenWrt One router is now shipping

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/1000272/

The OpenWrt One router, which was reviewed
here recently, is
now generally available.

This is the first wireless Internet router designed and built with
your software freedom and right to repair in mind. The OpenWrt One
will never be locked down and is forever unbrickable. This device
services your needs as its owner and user. Everyone deserves
control of their computing. The OpenWrt One takes a great first
step toward bringing software rights to your home: you can control
your own network with the software of your choice, and ensure your
right to change, modify, and repair it as you like.

[$] The kernel’s command-line commotion

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/999770/

For the most part, the 6.13 merge window has gone smoothly, with relatively
few problems or disagreements — other than this
one, of course. There is one other exception, though, relating to the
kernel’s presentation of a process’s command line to interested user-space
observers when a relatively new system call is used. A pull request with a
simple change to make that information more user-friendly ran afoul of
Linus Torvalds, who has his own view of how it should be managed.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/999744/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (pypy3), Fedora (chromium, cobbler, and libsoup3), Oracle (kernel), SUSE (glib2, govulncheck-vulndb, javapackages-tools, xmlgraphics-batik, xmlgraphics- commons, xmlgraphics-fop, libblkid-devel, opentofu, php8, postgresql, postgresql16, postgresql17, thunderbird, traefik, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (needrestart and rapidjson).

[$] The beginning of the 6.13 merge window

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998623/

As of this writing, just over 1,800 non-merge changesets have been pulled
into the mainline kernel for the 6.13 release. That number may seem small,
given that a typical merge window brings in at least 12,000 commits, but
the early pulls this time around have focused on significant core changes,
and there are quite a few of them. The time has come to summarize the
changes pulled so far, including lazy preemption, multi-grained timestamps,
new extended-attribute system calls, and more.

FreeCAD 1.0 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998807/

It took more than 20 years, but the FreeCAD computer-aided design project
has just made
its 1.0 release.

Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view
of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD
matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two
major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a
built-in assembly module.

Well, I’m very proud to say those two issues are now solved.

Incus 6.7 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998756/

Version 6.7 of the Incus container-management system (forked from LXD) has
been released. “This is another one of those pretty well rounded
releases with new features and improvements for everyone“. New
features include automatic cluster rebalancing, DHCP improvements, and more.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998755/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0, bcc, bluez, bpftrace, bubblewrap, flatpak, buildah, cockpit, containernetworking-plugins, cups, cyrus-imapd, edk2, expat, firefox, fontforge, gnome-shell, gnome-shell-extensions, grafana, grafana-pcp, gtk3, httpd, iperf3, jose, krb5, libgcrypt, libsoup, libvirt, libvpx, lldpd, microcode_ctl, mingw-glib2, mod_auth_openidc, nano, NetworkManager, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, openexr, osbuild-composer, pcp, podman, poppler, postfix, python-dns, python-jinja2, python-jwcrypto, python3.11, python3.11-PyMySQL, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.12-PyMySQL, python3.12-urllib3, python3.9, qemu-kvm, runc, skopeo, squid, thunderbird, toolbox, tpm2-tools, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Fedora (lemonldap-ng and mingw-expat), SUSE (bea-stax, xstream, expat, httpcomponents-client, httpcomponents-core, kernel, SUSE Manager Client Tools, SUSE Manager Proxy, Retail Branch Server 4.3, SUSE Manager Salt Bundle, SUSE Manager Server 4.3, and SUSE Manager Server 5.0), and Ubuntu (curl, glib2.0, and webkit2gtk).

AlmaLinux 9.5 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998637/

Version 9.5 of the AlmaLinux enterprise-oriented distribution has been
released.

AlmaLinux 9.5 aims to improve performance, development tooling, and
security. Updated module streams offer better support for web
applications. New versions of compilers provide access to the
latest features and optimizations that improve performance and
enable better code generation. The release also introduces
improvements to system performance monitoring, visualization, and
system performance data collecting.

[$] Development statistics for 6.12

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997959/

Linus Torvalds released
the 6.12 kernel on November 17, as expected. This development
cycle, the last for 2024, brought 13,344 non-merge changesets into the
mainline kernel; that made it a relatively slow cycle from this
perspective, but 6.12 includes a long list of significant new features.
The time has come to look at where those changes came from, and to look at
the year-long LTS cycle as well.

The 6.12 kernel has been released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997958/

Linus has released the 6.12 kernel.
“No strange surprises this last week, so we’re sticking to the regular
release schedule, and that obviously means that the merge window opens
tomorrow.“.

Headline features in this release include:

support for the Arm
permission overlay extension,
better compile-time control over which Spectre mitigations to employ,
the last pieces of realtime preemption support,
the realtime deadline server mechanism,
more EEVDF scheduler development,
the extensible scheduler class,
the device memory TCP work,
use of static calls in the security-module
subsystem,
the integrity
policy enforcement security module,
the ability to handle devices with a block size larger than the system page
size in the XFS filesystem,
and more.
See the LWN merge-window summaries
(part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.12 page for
more details.

A new package manager for OpenWrt

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998446/

The OpenWrt router-oriented distribution has long used its own opk
package manager. The project has just announced,
though, that future releases will use the apk
package manager from Alpine Linux instead. “This new package
manager offers a number of advantages over the older opkg system and is a
significant milestone in the development of the OpenWrt platform. The older
opkg package manager has been deprecated and is no longer part of
OpenWrt.” There is some more information on this
page.

[$] Two approaches to tightening restrictions on loadable modules

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/998221/

The kernel’s loadable-module facility allows code to be loaded into (and
sometimes removed from) a running kernel. Among other things, loadable
modules make it possible to run a kernel with only the subsystems needed
for the system’s hardware and workload. Loadable modules can also make it
easy for out-of-tree code to access parts of the kernel that developers
would prefer to keep private; this has led to many discussions in the
past. The topic has returned to the kernel’s mailing lists with two
different patch sets aimed at further tightening the restrictions applied
to loadable modules.

[$] Dancing the DMA two-step

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997563/

Direct memory access (DMA) I/O is simple in concept: a peripheral device
moves data directly to or from memory while the CPU is busy doing other
things. As is so often the case, DMA is rather more complicated in
practice, and the kernel has developed a complicated internal API to
support it. It turns out that the DMA API, as it exists now, can affect
the performance of some high-bandwidth devices. In an effort to address
that problem, Leon Romanovsky is making the API even more complex with this patch series
adding a new two-step mapping API.