Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/978151/

Systemd 256 has been released. As usual, the list of changes is long; see
this article for an overview, or the
announcement for all the details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/978137/

The openSUSE
Leap 15.6 release is available; this is intended to be the last
Leap 15.x release before Leap 16 comes out.
“Leap 15.6 is projected to receive maintenance and security updates
until the end of 2025 to ensure sufficient overlap with the next
release“. Changes include the addition of the Cockpit server-management tool, a
6.4 kernel, GNOME 45, and many other upgrades. This release also
removes a long list of unmaintained Python packages. See the
release notes for details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/978007/

The extensible scheduler class
(“sched_ext”) framework allows the writing of CPU schedulers as a set of
BPF programs. It has been somewhat
controversial, and its merging into the kernel has been blocked despite
a clear level of interest from users.

Linus Torvalds has now let
it be known that he has made a decision and, overriding the scheduler
maintainer, will merge sched_ext for the 6.11 release.

I honestly see no reason to delay this any more. This whole
patchset was the major (private) discussion at last year’s kernel
maintainer summit, and I don’t find any value in having the same
discussion (whether off-list or as an actual event) at the upcoming
maintainer summit one year later, so to make any kind of sane
progress, my current plan is to merge this for 6.11.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977973/

Version
127.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include support for DNS
prefetching and the ability to close duplicate tabs in a window. The
browser will now try to upgrade images and videos with HTTP URLs that are
found in an HTTPS page to HTTPS as well; if that fails, the non-HTTPS
resources will simply fail to load.

Update: this
Mozilla Secuirty Blog post describes the HTTPS-related changes in
detail.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977939/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ruby:3.3), Fedora (efifs, libvirt, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, and strongswan), Red Hat (firefox, idm:DL1, ipa, nghttp2, and thunderbird), SUSE (aws-nitro-enclaves-cli, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, containerized-data-importer, frr, glibc, go1.21, go1.22, gstreamer-plugins-base, kernel, kernel-firmware-nvidia-gspx-G06, nvidia-open- driver-G06-signed, libxml2, mariadb, poppler, python-Brotli, python-docker, python-idna, rmt-server, skopeo, sssd, unbound, unrar, util-linux, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (giflib, libphp-adodb, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-laptop, linux-oem-6.8, nodejs, and tiff).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977310/

P4, short for “Programming
Protocol-independent Packet Processors”, is a programming language aimed at
networking devices; it is useful for the configuration of firewalls and
complicated routing architectures. Since a lot of advanced networking is
done with Linux systems, it stands to reason that there would be value in
supporting P4 and, indeed, an
implementation of P4 in the kernel’s traffic-control subsystem was
first posted by Jamal Hadi Salim at the beginning of 2023. After nearly
18 months, though, this feature has not been merged, and the chances
of that happening would appear to be getting worse.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977765/

Version 5.40.0 of the Perl language has been released. “Perl 5.40.0
represents approximately 11 months of development since Perl 5.38.0 and
contains approximately 160,000 lines of changes across 1,500 files from 75
authors“. Significant changes include a new __CLASS__
keyword, a :reader: attribute for field variables, a new
“^^” logical-XOR operator (because two of those were not enough),
moving “try/catch” out of the experimental category, and more; see
this
page for lots of details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977725/

The 6.10-rc3 kernel prepatch is out.
“So things look good, the water is warm, please jump right in and keep
testing,“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/976836/

The kernel’s user-space ABI does not lack for ring buffers; they have been
defined for subsystems like BPF, io_uring, perf,
and tracing, for
example. Naturally, each of those ring buffers is unique, with no common
interface between them. The natural response to this ABI proliferation is,
of course, to add yet another ring buffer as the generic option; that is
the intent of this
patch series from Kent Overstreet adding a new set of system calls for
ring buffers.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/975974/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 6, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977070/

We have just received the
sad news that longtime core BSD developer Mike Karels has died; he will
certainly be missed.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977059/

Version 6.2 of the Incus container-management system is out. “This
release contains the second wave of changes contributed by students of the
University of Texas at Austin and a few other features and
improvements.” The features include a new incus top
command, a new API for system load information, and more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/977033/

In the recent discussion on commenting at
LWN, several readers asked for the ability to hide subthreads of a long
comment stream. That feature has just been added; it is also integrated
with the three comment-display modes and with comment filtering, removing
the need for JavaScript for filtering. Hiding is not persistent; no extra
data is stored at either end.

Give it a try; if you have comments on the new mechanism, this is the place
to put them.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/976977/

Security updates have been issued by Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, git, libreoffice, microcode, python-requests, webkit2, and wireshark), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, glibc, go-toolset:ol8, idm:DL1 and idm:client, less, python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9, ruby:3.0, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (nodejs, nodejs:18, python-idna, and ruby:3.1), and SUSE (389-ds, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, gnutls, gstreamer-plugins-base, libhtp, mariadb104, poppler, python-python-jose, squid, and unbound).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/976498/

The second 6.10 kernel prepatch is out for
testing. “Nothing feels particularly odd, but rc2 is usually fairly small and
people are only starting to find regressions.

So please go test some more.“

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/976125/

The “pidfdfs” virtual filesystem was added to the 6.9 kernel release as a
way to export better information about running processes to user space. It
replaced a previous implementation in a way that was, on its surface, fully
compatible while adding a number of new capabilities. This transition,
which was intended to be entirely invisible to existing applications,
already ran into trouble in March, when a
misunderstanding with SELinux caused systems with pidfdfs to fail to boot
properly. That problem was quickly fixed, but it turns out that there was
one more surprise in store, showing just how hard ABI compatibility can be
at times.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/976319/

The 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit will happen on September 17 in
Vienna, Austria; it is an invitation-only event for a small group to
discuss important kernel-development problems. The call for
proposals for this gathering has now been posted. One of the best ways
to be invited to the event is to propose a topic that needs discussion in
that forum. The deadline for proposals is June 18.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/976211/

The developers of the Krita painting
application are celebrating
25 years of development with a detailed history of the project.

A quarter century. That’s how long we’ve been working on
Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop,
but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it
was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was
renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974709/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 30, 2024 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/975597/

When redesigning the LWN site in 2002, we thought long and hard about
whether the ability to post comments should be part of it; LWN had not
offered that feature for the first four years of its existence. There were
already plenty of examples of how comments can go bad by then, but we
decided to trust our readers to keep things under control. Much of the
time, that trust has proved justified, but there have been times where
things have not gone so well. This time is quickly becoming one of those
others.