Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/980556/

David Rosenthal looks
back at 40 years of the X Window System:

A major reason for Sun’s early success was that they in effect
open-sourced the Network File System. X11 was open source under the
MIT license. I, and some of the other Sun engineers, understood
that NeWS could not displace X11 as the Unix standard window system
without being equally open source. But Sun’s management looked at
NeWS and saw superior technology, an extension of the PostScript
that Adobe was selling, and couldn’t bring themselves to give it
away.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979683/

Like many kernel subsystems, the Linux security module (LSM) subsystem
makes extensive use of indirect function calls. Those calls, however, are
increasingly problematic, and the pressure to remove them has been growing.
The good news is that there is a patch
series from KP Singh that accomplishes that goal. Its progress into
the mainline has been slow — this change was first proposed
by Brendan Jackman and Paul Renauld in 2020 — and this work has been caught
up in some wider controversies along the way, but it should be close to
being ready.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/980393/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (httpd:2.4/httpd), Arch Linux (openssh), Fedora (cups, emacs, and python-urllib3), Gentoo (OpenSSH), Mageia (ffmpeg, gdb, openssl, python-idna, and python-imageio), Red Hat (golang and kernel), SUSE (booth, libreoffice, openssl-1_1-livepatches, podman, python-arcomplete, python-Fabric, python-PyGithub, python- antlr4-python3-runtime, python-avro, python-chardet, python-distro, python- docker, python-fakeredis, python-fixedint, pyth, python-Js2Py, python310, python39, and squid), and Ubuntu (cups and netplan.io).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/980312/

While the end of support for CentOS 7, which happened on June 30, is
significant, it is also worth taking a moment to reflect on the end of
Scientific Linux 7, which has also just occurred. Scientific Linux
was once a popular RHEL rebuild supported by Fermilab, CERN, DESY, and ETH
Zurich. Development of Scientific Linux stopped with SL7, with the labs
switching to CentOS thereafter, but the SL7 release was supported through
to the bitter end. Thanks are due to all who built and supported
Scientific Linux; you provided a useful and stable platform for many years.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/980252/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dcmtk, edk2, emacs, glibc, gunicorn, libmojolicious-perl, openssh, org-mode, pdns-recursor, tryton-client, and tryton-server), Fedora (freeipa, kitty, libreswan, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-poppler, and mingw-python-urllib3), Gentoo (cpio, cryptography, GNU Emacs, Org Mode, GStreamer, GStreamer Plugins, Liferea, Pixman, SDL_ttf, SSSD, and Zsh), Oracle (pki-core), Red Hat (httpd:2.4, libreswan, and pki-core), SUSE (glib2 and kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-exportproxy-container, virt-exportserver-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-t), and Ubuntu (espeak-ng, libcdio, and openssh).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/980211/

OpenSSH 9.8 has been
released, fixing an ugly vulnerability:

Successful exploitation has been demonstrated on 32-bit Linux/glibc
systems with ASLR. Under lab conditions, the attack requires on
average 6-8 hours of continuous connections up to the maximum the
server will accept. Exploitation on 64-bit systems is believed to
be possible but has not been demonstrated at this time. It’s likely
that these attacks will be improved upon.

Exploitation on non-glibc systems is conceivable but has not been
examined.

There is a
configuration workaround for systems that cannot be updated, though it
has its own problems. See this Qualys
advisory for more details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/980175/

Linus has released 6.10-rc6 for testing.
“This release continues to be fairly calm, and rc6 looks pretty small.
It’s also entirely just random small fixes spread all over, with no bigger
pattern.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979912/

The academic and the Linux real-time and scheduling community mourns the
premature death of Daniel Bristot de
Oliveira. Daniel died at the age of 37 on Monday, June 24, 2024.
Juri Lelli, Tommaso Cucinotta, Steve Rostedt, Kate Stewart, and Thomas
Gleixner have come together to share their thoughts on his life and what he
has left behind

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979549/

It has been nearly one year since the
first version of the device memory TCP patches was posted by Mina
Almasry. Now on the 14th
revision, this series appears to be stabilizing. Device memory TCP is
a specialized networking feature requiring a certain amount of setup, but
it could provide a significant performance improvement for some
data-intensive applications.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979084/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 27, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979741/

The Rust Blog is carrying an
update on what the Rust Types Team has been up to and its near-future
plans.

There has been a
lot of work on the next-generation
trait solver. The initiative posted a
separate update at the end of last year. While we would have
liked to stabilize its
use in coherence a few months ago, this surfaced additional
small behavior regressions and hangs, causing delays. We are
working on fixing these issues and intend to merge the
stabilization PR soon. We are getting close to compiling the
standard library and the compiler with the new solver enabled
everywhere, after which will be able to run crater to figure out
the remaining issues.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979617/

We have just received the
sad news of the passing of Daniel Bristot de Oliveira at far too young
an age. He was a strong contributor to the core kernel and associated
realtime infrastructure, and always a joyful presence in person; he will be
deeply missed.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979609/

Nature looks
at a recent paper on the openness of “open-source” language
models.

It is not yet clear how many of these models will fit the EU’s
definition of open source. Under the act, this would refer to
models that are released under a “free and open” licence that, for
example, allows users to modify a model but says nothing about
access to training data. Refining this definition will probably
form “a single pressure point that will be targeted by corporate
lobbies and big companies”, the paper says.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979606/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python3.11), Debian (composer), Fedora (thunderbird), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, python-aiohttp, python-gunicorn, python-werkzeug, and virtualbox), Oracle (libreswan and python3.11), Red Hat (git, kpatch-patch, python3.11, python3.9, and thunderbird), and SUSE (avahi, ghostscript, grafana and mybatis, hdf5, kernel, openssl-1_1-livepatches, python-docker, and wget).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979532/

Changwoo Min has posted an
introduction to writing custom schedulers with sched_ext.

In a particular situation, when each scheduling policy needs its
specific action, the core kernel scheduler calls an operation
defined in struct sched_class. For example, when the core
kernel scheduler needs to select a task to be scheduled, it calls
the sched_class.pick_next_task(rq) callback of a concrete
scheduling policy. When a task becomes runnable, the core kernel
scheduler calls sched_class.enqueue(rq, p, flags) so the
concrete scheduling policy enqueues task p to run queue
rq. When a task’s runtime state needs to be updated, the
core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.update_curr(rq).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979491/

Version
29.4 of the Emacs editor has been released. This is “an emergency
bugfix release” fixing a vulnerability that can cause
the editor to execute arbitrary shell code in Org mode. Anybody who runs Emacs on
untrusted files — including those using Gnus or one of the Emacs mail modes
— should be looking to update. For those who cannot update, a pair of
messages from Russ
Allbery and Florian Weimer
investigates how to disable the Org-mode evaluation, a task that is
seemingly more complicated than it should be.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979442/

The 6.10-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “So far, the 6.10 release cycle has been fairly calm, and rc5
continues that trend. Let’s hope things stay that way.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979419/

The linux-wireless mailing list carries the terse
notice that longtime networking developer Larry Finger passed away on
June 21. The LWN Kernel
Source Database shows that Finger contributed to 94 releases in
the (Git era) kernel history, starting with 2.6.16 — 1,464 commits in
total. He will be missed.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/979177/

Version
13.5 of the privacy-focused Tor browser has been released.

Regular readers of our release posts will know that for the past
two years we’ve been gradually increasing our capacity to not only
maintain, but bring tangible improvements to Tor Browser for
Android. In that respect, Tor Browser 13.5 feels like a milestone:
in addition to the dozens of bug fixes and minor improvements noted
in the changelog below, this release features major changes to
Android’s connection experience in preparation for the future
addition of Connection Assist, including full access to Settings
before connecting and a new, permanent home for Tor logs.

The release also features desktop user-interface improvements and enhanced
fingerprinting protection.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/978846/

User namespaces in Linux create an
environment in which all privileges are granted, but their effect is
contained within the namespace; they have become an important tool for the
implementation of containers. They have also become a significant source
of worries for people who do not like the increased attack surface they
create for the kernel. Various attempts have been made to restrict that
attack surface over the years; the latest is user namespace
capabilities, posted by Jonathan Calmels.