All posts by corbet

The BPF instruction set architecture is now RFC 9669

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997002/

After a couple of years of effort, the BPF instruction set architecture has
been accepted as RFC
9669, giving it a standard outside of the in-kernel implementation. This message from David
Vernet (who also contributed an article on
the standardization process last year) describes the process and why it
is important:

Though some vendors have already implemented BPF offloading
capabilities without having a standardized ISA, others are not
quite as risk tolerant. As Christoph [Hellwig] discussed at LSFMM
2022, certain NVMe vendors have expressed an interest in building
BPF offloading capabilities for various use cases such as eXpress
Resubmission Path (XRP), but they simply can’t fund such a project
without certain components of BPF being standardized. Hence, the
effort to standardize BPF was born.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/997030/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, openexr, and thunderbird), Fedora (llama-cpp and python-quart), Oracle (firefox, openexr, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (chromium, govulncheck-vulndb, openssl-1_1, python311, and python312), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, openjpeg2, and ruby3.0, ruby3.2, ruby3.3).

[$] The OpenWrt One system

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/994961/

OpenWrt is, despite its relatively low
profile, one of our community’s most important distributions; it runs
untold numbers of network routers and has served as the base on which a lot
of network-oriented development (including the bufferbloat-reduction
work) has been done. At the beginning of 2024, a few members of the
project announced
a plan to design and produce a router device specifically designed to run
OpenWrt. This device, dubbed the “OpenWrt One”, is now becoming available;
the kind folks at the Software Freedom
Conservancy were kind enough to ship one to LWN, where the desire to
play with a new toy is never lacking.

[$] The Overture open-mapping project

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/995992/

OpenStreetMap tends to dominate
the space for open mapping data, but it is not the only project working in
this area. At the 2024 Open
Source Summit Japan, Marc Prioleau presented the Overture Maps Foundation, which is
building and distributing a set of worldwide maps under open licenses.
Overture may have a similar goal to OpenStreetMap, but its approach and
intended uses are significantly different.

Flock: a Flutter fork

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/996147/

A project called Flock has announced
its existence. Flock is a fork of the Flutter user-interface toolkit
project, motivated by frustration with the resources that Google is putting
into Flutter.

We describe Flock as “Flutter+”. In other words, we do not want, or
intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly
up to date with Flutter. Flock will add important bug fixes, and
popular community features, which the Flutter team either can’t, or
won’t implement.

(LWN looked at flutter in 2020).

Kernel prepatch 6.12-rc5

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/995981/

Linus has released 6.12-rc5 for testing.

rc5 looks perfectly normal, and maybe even on the small side of
normal. The diffstat looks nice and flat too, with the exception of
the removal of the da8xx fbdev driver due to it having been
replaced by the tilcdc driver. And I’m sure we’re all thinking the
same thing: “What lovely descriptive driver names we have”.

[$] realloc() and the oversize importance of zero-size objects

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/995196/

Small objects can lead to large email threads. In this
case, the GNU C Library (glibc) community has been having an extensive
debate over the handling of zero-byte allocations. Specifically, what
should happen when a program calls realloc()
specifying a size of zero? This is, it seems, a topic about which some
people, at least, have strong feelings.

Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/995186/

Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development
kernel was the removal
of several entries from the kernel’s MAINTAINERS file. The patch
performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the
[email protected] mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers
pull request with no particular mention.

The explanation for the removal is simply “various compliance
requirements“. Given that the developers involved all appear to be of
Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is
involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy
that required the removal of these entries.

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/995095/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, ghostscript, libsepol, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, perl, and python-sql), Oracle (389-ds-base, buildah, containernetworking-plugins, edk2, httpd, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, python-setuptools, skopeo, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (buildah), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (apache2, firefox, libopenssl-3-devel, podman, and python310-starlette), and Ubuntu (cups-browsed, firefox, libgsf, and linux-gke).

A new kernel testing tree

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/994983/

Sasha Levin has announced a
new tree that is intended to perform continuous-integration tests of pull
requests aimed at the mainline. The plan is for this tree to hold more
finished work than sometimes ends up in linux-next; in a name that seems
destined to create typographical confusion, it is called “linus-next”.

The linus-next tree aims to provide a more stable and testable
integration point compared to linux-next, addressing the runtime
issues that make testing linux-next challenging and focusing on
code that’s about to be pulled by Linus.

[$] The long road to lazy preemption

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/994322/

The kernel’s CPU scheduler currently offers several preemption modes that
implement a range of tradeoffs between system throughput and response time.
Back in September 2023, a discussion
on scheduling led to the concept of “lazy preemption”, which could
simplify scheduling in the kernel while providing better results. Things
went quiet for a while, but lazy preemption has returned in the form of this patch series
from Peter Zijlstra. While the concept appears to work well, there is
still a fair amount of work to be done.

Rust 1.82.0 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/994654/

Version
1.82.0 of the Rust language has been released. There are a lot of new
features this time, including a cargo info command, tier-1 support
for 64-bit Apple Arm systems, a new native syntax (&raw) to create
raw pointers, changes to unsafe extern, unsafe attributes,
standardized rules around the handling of floating-point not-a-number
values, and more.