Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/987393/
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (nodejs:20), Debian (python3.11), Fedora (dotnet8.0), Red Hat (bind, krb5, libreoffice, linux-firmware, orc, orc:0.4.28, and orc:0.4.31), SUSE (mariadb and openssl-3), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/987320/
The developers of the Pidgin chat program
have announced that
a malicious plugin had been listed on its third-party plugins list for over
one month. This plugin included a key logger and could capture
screenshots.
It went unnoticed at the time that the plugin was not providing any
source code and was only providing binaries for download. Going
forward, we will be requiring that all plugins that we link to have
an OSI Approved Open Source License and that some level of due
diligence has been done to verify that the plugin is safe for
users.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986892/
The genksyms tool has long been buried deeply within the kernel’s
build system; it is one of the two C-code parsers shipped with the kernel
(the other being the
horrifying kernel-doc script). It is a key part of how the
kernel’s module-loading infrastructure works. While genksyms has
quietly done its job for decades, that period may soon be coming to an end.
It would seem that genksyms is not up to the task of handling Rust
code, so Sami Tolvanen is proposing
a new tool to handle this task going forward.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/987164/
The 6.11-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “Other than the timing, there’s not a whole lot unusual
” Linus Torvalds added a
here. The diffstat looks fairly flat, which means ‘mostly pretty small
changes’.
note that today marks the 33rd anniversary of the first Linux
announcement; “A third of a century. And it *still* isn’t ready
“.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986906/
Version
24.8 of the LibreOffice office suite has been released. Changes
include the ability to filter identifying information from exported files,
easier creation of cross reference, better control over hyphenation, a
number of new spreadsheet functions, accessibility improvements, and more.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986844/
Matthew Garrett describes
the role of the Secure Boot Advanced Targeting mechanism and how it
played into the recent Windows upgrade problems.
So why is this suddenly relevant? SBAT was developed
collaboratively between the Linux community and Microsoft, and
Microsoft chose to push a Windows update that told systems not to
trust versions of grub with a security generation below a certain
level. This was because those versions of grub had genuine security
vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to compromise the
Windows secure boot chain, and we’ve seen real world examples of
malware wanting to do that.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985783/
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 22, 2024 is available.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986174/
One tactic often used by attackers set on compromising a system is heap spraying; in
short, the attacker fills as much of the heap as possible with crafted data
in the hope of getting the target system to use that data in a bad way. If
heap spraying can be blocked, attackers will lose an important tool. The
kernel has some heap-spraying defenses now, including the dedicated bucket allocator merged for the
upcoming 6.11 release, but its author, Kees Cook, thinks that more can be
done.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986450/
Security updates have been issued by Debian (squid), Fedora (putty), Mageia (quictls), Oracle (bind, curl, python-setuptools, python3.11-setuptools, and python3.12-setuptools), Red Hat (kernel, kpatch-patch-4_18_0-305_120_1, kpatch-patch-4_18_0-372_87_1 and kpatch-patch-4_18_0-372_91_1, kpatch-patch-4_18_0-477_43_1, kpatch-patch-4_18_0-553, kpatch-patch-5_14_0-284_48_1 and kpatch-patch-5_14_0-284_52_1, kpatch-patch-5_14_0-427_13_1, and libreoffice), SUSE (cosign, dri3proto, presentproto, wayland-protocols, xwayland, freerdp, fwupdate, git, gnome-settings-daemon, hdf5, jasper, java-17-openjdk, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-firmware, libaom, libqt5-qt3d, libqt5-qtquick3d, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, osc, python, python-aiohttp, python-azure-core, python-azure-storage-blob, python- azure-storage-queue, python-typing, python-typing_extensions, python-Jinja2, python-PyMySQL, python-requests, python-tqdm, python-WebOb, python3-sqlparse, python310, python311, qemu, sssd, thunderbird, tiff, unixODBC, uriparser, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, linux-azure-5.4, and postgresql-12, postgresql-14, postgresql-16).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986167/
The Rust code being added to the kernel is documented using the usual rustdoc
conventions; that documentation is now available on kernel.org in
formatted form. There is also the linux-next version of
the documentation for Rust code that will land in the kernel soon.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/986163/
The fourth 6.11 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. According to Linus:
But it all looks fairly normal. rc4 is bigger than either rc2 or
rc3 were, but not hugely so, and it’s actually a normal pattern,
where it takes a while before people find some issues. So nothing
feels all that odd.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/984839/
The kernel’s memory-management developers have been busy in recent times;
it can be hard to keep up with all that has been happening in this core
area. In an attempt to catch up, here is a look at recent work
affecting tiered-memory systems, underutilized huge pages, and duplicated
file data in the Enhanced Read-Only Filesystem (EROFS).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/984770/
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 15, 2024 is available.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985482/
Version 6.4 of the Incus container manager is out.
This release builds upon the recently added OCI support from Incus
6.3, making it even easier to run application containers. It also
adds a number of useful new features for clustered and larger
environments with more control on the virtual CPU used when live
migrating VMs and finer grained resource constraints within
projects.
See this
announcement for details.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985481/
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel and roundcube), Fedora (microcode_ctl, pypy, python2.7, and python3.6), Oracle (389-ds-base, httpd, kernel, kernel-container, and linux-firmware), Red Hat (kernel-rt), SUSE (firefox, kubernetes1.23, libqt5-qtbase, openssl-1_1, python-gunicorn, python-Twisted, python-urllib3, and qt6-base), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.15, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-raspi, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle-5.15, and qemu).
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985296/
The Rust project has developed a
set of goals for the latter half of 2024.
Rust
for Linux. The experimental support for Rust
development in the Linux kernel is a watershed moment for Rust,
demonstrating to the world that Rust is indeed capable of targeting
all manner of low-level systems applications. And yet today that
support rests on a number of
unstable features, blocking the effort from ever going beyond
experimental status. For 2024H2 we will work to close the largest
gaps that block support.
Other goals include completing the 2024 Rust
Edition and improving the language’s async support.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985233/
Linus has released 6.11-rc3 right on
schedule. “Nothing particularly strange or interesting going on, things
“.
look normal
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985198/
The
6.10.4,
6.6.45, and
6.1.104
stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of
important updates as usual.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/985043/
The Canonical Kernel Team has announced
a new policy regarding the version of the kernel that will ship with each
Ubuntu release; the result will generally be the shipping of newer
releases.
To provide users with the absolute latest in features and hardware
support, Ubuntu will now ship the absolute latest available version
of the upstream Linux kernel at the specified Ubuntu release freeze
date, even if upstream is still in Release Candidate (RC) status.
The post goes on to acknowledge that “there are issues with this
“; there are a lot of policy details that will apply depending
approach
on just how raw the shipped kernel is.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/984635/
Sometimes, the smallest changes create the longest discussions. As a case
in point, a proposal to make a one-line change in an informational text
file on systems running the Debian unstable distribution has blown up into
an interminable and sometimes unfriendly debate. At its core, though, this
discussion comes down to a seemingly simple question: should a program be
able to determine whether it is running on a Debian testing or unstable
system?