All posts by corbet

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.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997903/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gstreamer1-plugins-base), Debian (chromium, ghostscript, libarchive, mpg123, ruby-saml, and symfony), Fedora (buildah and podman), Red Hat (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, podman, skopeo, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (wget), SUSE (pcp), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux-xilinx-zynqmp and mysql-8.0).

[$] The top open-source security events in 2024

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/996955/

What have been the most significant security-related incidents for the
open-source community in 2024 (so far)? Marta Rybczyńska recently ran a
poll and got some interesting results. At the 2024 Open
Source Summit Japan, she presented those results along with some
commentary of her own. The events in question are unlikely to be a
surprise to LWN readers, but the overall picture that was presented was
worth a look.

Cohen: gccrs: An alternative compiler for Rust

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997483/

Arthur Cohen has posted a
detailed introduction to the gccrs project on the Rust Blog, seemingly
with the goal of convincing the Rust community about the value of the
project.

Likewise, many GCC plugins are used for increasing the safety of
critical projects such as the Linux kernel, which has recently
gained support for the Rust programming language. This makes
gccrs a useful tool for analyzing unsafe Rust code, and
more generally Rust code which has to interact with existing C
code. We also want gccrs to be a useful tool for
rustc itself by helping pan out the Rust specification
effort with a unique viewpoint – that of a tool trying to replicate
another’s functionality, oftentimes through careful experimentation
and source reading where the existing documentation did not go into
enough detail.

(LWN last looked at gccrs in October).

[$] The trouble with struct sockaddr’s fake flexible array

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997094/

Flexible arrays — arrays that are declared as the final member of a
structure and which have a size determined at run time — have long drawn
the attention of developers seeking to harden the kernel against
buffer-overflow vulnerabilities. These arrays have reliably been a source
of bugs, so anything that can be done to ensure that operations on them
stay within bounds is a welcome improvement. While many improvements,
including the recent counted-by work, have
been made, one of the most difficult cases remains. Now, however,
developers who are interested in using recent compiler bounds-checking
features are trying to get a handle on struct sockaddr.

Funding restored for man-page maintenance

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997193/

Man pages maintainer Alejandro Colomar announced in September that he was suspending
his work due to a lack of support. He has now let
it be known that funding has been found for the next year at least:

We’ve been talking for a couple of months, and we have already
agreed to sign a contract through the LF [Linux Foundation], where
a number of companies provide the funds for the contract. The
contract will cover the next 12 months for the agreed amount, and
we should sign it in the following days. Since I’ve already seen a
draft of the contract, and it looks good, I’ve already started
maintaining the project again, starting on Nov 1st.