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.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974943/

In the final session in the memory-management track of the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, the exhausted group of
developers looked one more time at the use of huge pages and the associated
problem of memory fragmentation. At its worst, this problem can make huge
pages harder (and more expensive) to allocate. Luis Chamberlain, who ran
the session, felt that people were worried about this problem, but that
there was little data on how severe it truly is.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974939/

A longstanding tradition in the memory-management track of the Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit is a session with
maintainer Andrew Morton to discuss the overall state of the community and
the development process. The 2024 gathering upheld that tradition toward
the end of the final day of the event. It seems that Morton and the
assembled developers were all happy with how memory-management work is
going, but there is always room for improvement.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/975529/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (less), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable), SUSE (apache2, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, libqt5-qtnetworkauth, and openssl-3), and Ubuntu (netatalk and python-cryptography).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/975454/

Geoff Huston suggests
that it is time to give up on DNSSEC and look for a better way to secure
the Internet namespace.

What appears to be very clear (to me at any rate!) is that DNSSEC
as we know it today is just not going anywhere. It’s too complex,
too fragile and just too slow to use for the majority of services
and their users. Some value its benefits highly enough that they
are prepared to live with its shortcomings, but that’s not the case
for the overall majority of name holders and for the majority of
users, and no amount of passionate exhortations about DNSSEC will
change this.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974937/

One of the long-term goals of the folio conversion in the kernel’s
memory-management subsystem is the replacement of the page
structure, which describes a page of physical memory, with an eight-byte
“memory descriptor”. This change would reduce the overhead of tracking
physical memory, increase type safety, and make memory management more
flexible. Thus far, though, details on what the memory-descriptor future
will look like have been relatively scarce. At the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Matthew Wilcox led a
discussion to try to fill in the picture somewhat.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974869/

Linus Torvalds released 6.10-rc1 and closed
the 6.10 merge window on May 26. By that time, 11,534 non-merge
changesets had been pulled into the mainline for the next release; nearly
5,000 of those came in after “The first half of
the 6.10 merge window” was written. While the latter half of the merge
window tends to focus more on fixes, there was also a lot of new
functionality that landed during this time.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/974860/

The maple tree data structure was added
during the 6.1 development cycle; since then, it has taken its
place at the core of the kernel’s memory-management subsystem.
Unsurprisingly, work on maple trees is not yet done. Maple-tree maintainer
Liam Howlett ran a session in the memory-management track of the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit to discuss the current
state of the maple tree and which features can be expected next.