Ok, so this rc3 looks a bit different than the usual ones, because
there’s a large series to bcachefs to do filesystem repair after
corruption. Not normally something we’d see in an rc kernel, but
hey, if you had a corrupted bcachefs filesystem you’d probably want
this, and if you thought bcachefs was stable already, I have a
bridge to sell you. Special deal only for you, real cheap.
OpenBSD 7.5 has been released. The list of changes and improvements is, as
usual, long; it includes the pinsyscalls() functionality covered
here in January.
Version 7.0 of the
FFmpeg audio/video toolkit is out. “The most noteworthy changes for
most users are a native VVC decoder (currently experimental, until more
fuzzing is done), IAMF support, or a multi-threaded ffmpeg CLI tool“.
There’s also the usual list of new formats and codecs, and a few deprecated
features have been removed.
Version
6.0 LTS of the Incus container management system has been released.
“This is a major milestone for Incus as it marks our first release with
extended support, suitable for use in production environments where monthly
feature releases aren’t suitable.” Changes include swap limits for
containers, a new shell completion mechanism, support for the creation of
VLAN interfaces, improved live migration, and more.
Obviously I’m kidding with the title here, but for GCC 14 I’ve
implemented a new warning: -Wanalyzer-infinite-loop that’s able to
detect some simple cases of infinite loops.
See also: this report from the 2023 GNU
Tools Cauldron.
The Rust programming language differs from C in many ways; those
differences tend to be what users admire in the language. But those
differences can also lead to an impedance mismatch when Rust code is
integrated into a C-dominated system, and it can be even worse in the
kernel, which is not a typical C program. Memory models are a case in
point. A programming language’s view of memory is sufficiently fundamental
and arcane that many developers never have to learn much about it. It is
hard to maintain that sort of blissful ignorance while working in the
kernel, though, so a recent discussion of how to choose a memory model for
kernel code in Rust is of interest.
The SUSE Security Team Blog is carrying a
detailed article on SUSE’s review of the KDE6 release.
The SUSE security team restricts the installation of system wide
D-Bus services and Polkit policies in openSUSE distributions and
derived SUSE products. Any package that ships these features needs
to be reviewed by us first, before it can be added to production
repositories.
In November, openSUSE KDE packagers approached us with a long list
of KDE components for an upcoming KDE6 major release. The packages
needed adjusted D-Bus and Polkit whitelistings due to renamed
interfaces or other breaking changes. Looking into this many
components at once was a unique experience that also led to new
insights, which will be discussed in this article.
The first stable release of Redict, a fork of the Redis in-memory database
under a copyleft license, has been announced.
You may be wondering why Redict would be of interest to you,
particularly when compared with Valkey,
another Redis fork that was announced on Thursday.
In technical terms, we are focusing on stability and long-term
maintenance, and on achieving excellence within our current
scope. We believe that Redict is near feature-complete and that it
is more valuable to our users if we take a conservative stance to
innovation and focus on long-term reliability instead. This is in
part a choice we’ve made to distinguish ourselves from Valkey,
whose commercial interests are able to invest more resources into
developing more radical innovations, but also an acknowledgement of
a cultural difference between our projects, in that the folks
behind Redict place greater emphasis on software with a finite
scope and ambitions towards long-term stability rather than
focusing on long-term growth in scope and complexity.
A common theme in early-days anti-Linux FUD was that, since anybody can
contribute to the code, it cannot be trusted. Over two decades later, one
rarely hears that line anymore; experience has shown that free-software
communities are not prone to shipping overtly hostile code. But, as the backdooring of XZ has reminded us, the
embedding of malicious code is, unfortunately, not limited to the
proprietary realm. Our community will be busy analyzing this incident for
some time to come, but clear conclusions may be hard to come by.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (kernel and webkitgtk), Mageia (unixODBC and w3m), and SUSE (libvirt, netty, netty-tcnative, and perl-DBD-SQLite).
Version 10.0 of the NetBSD system has been released.
The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is
high time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This
matches the long time it took for the development branch to get
ready for branching, a lot of development went into this new
release.
This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest
we ever did.
The reality that we are struggling with is that the free software
infrastructure on which much of computing runs is massively and
painfully underfunded by society as a whole, and is almost entirely
dependent on random people maintaining things in their free time
because they find it fun, many of whom are close to burnout. This
is, in many ways, the true root cause of this entire event.
There is no way to discuss this in public without turning a single
malicious entity into 10 000 malicious entities once the
information is widely known.
Making sure the impact and mitigations are known before posting
this publicly so that everyone knows what to do before the 10 000
malicious entities start attacking is just common sense.
Again the FOSS world has proven to be vigilant and proactive in
finding bugs and backdoors, IMHO. The level of transparency is
stellar, especially compared to proprietary software
companies. What the FOSS world has accomplished in 24 hours after
detection of the backdoor code in #xz deserves a moment of
humbleness. Instead we have flamewars and armchair experts shouting
that we must change everything NOW. Which would introduce even more
risks. Progress is made iteratively. Learn, adapt, repeat.
Andres Freund has posted a
detailed investigation into a backdoor that was shipped with versions
5.6.0 and 5.6.1 of the xz compression utility. It appears that the
malicious code may be aimed at allowing SSH authentication to be bypassed.
I have not yet analyzed precisely what is being checked for in the
injected code, to allow unauthorized access. Since this is running
in a pre-authentication context, it seems likely to allow some form
of access or other form of remote code execution.
The affected versions are not yet widely shipped, but checking systems for
the bad version would be a good idea.
Radicle is a new, peer-to-peer,
MIT/Apache-licensed collaboration platform written in Rust and built on top
of Git. It adds support for issues and pull requests (which Radicle calls
“patches”) on top of core Git, which are stored in the Git repository
itself. Unlike GitHub, GitLab, and similar forges, Radicle is distributed;
it doesn’t rely on having everyone use the same server. Instead, Radicle
instances form a network that synchronizes changes between nodes.
Another major feature landing in Fedora Workstation 40 that Jonas
Ådahl and Ray Strode has spent a lot of effort on is finalizing the
remote desktop support for GNOME on Wayland. So there has been
support for remote connections for already logged in sessions
already, but with these updates you can do the login remotely too
and thus the session do not need to be started already on the
remote machine. This work will also enable 3rd party solutions to
do remote logins on Wayland systems, so while I am not at liberty
to mention names, be on the lookout for more 3rd party Wayland
remoting software becoming available this year.
Version 4.10.0 of the Samba Windows interoperability suite has been
released. Changes include better support for group-managed service
accounts, an experimental Windows search protocol client, support for
conditional access control entries, and more.
The PostgreSQL community is dealing with the loss of Simon Riggs, who
passed away on March 26:
Simon was responsible for many of the enterprise features we find
in PostgreSQL today, including point in time recovery, hot standby,
and synchronous replication. He was the founder of 2ndQuadrant
which employed many of the PostgreSQL developers, later becoming
part of EDB where he worked as a Postgres Fellow until his
retirement. He was responsible for the UK PostgreSQL conferences
for many years until he passed that responsibility to PostgreSQL
Europe last year.
The 6.9-rc1
kernel prepatch was released on March 24, closing the merge window for
this development cycle. By that time, 12,435 non-merge changesets had been
merged into the mainline, making for a less-busy merge window than the last
couple of kernel releases (but similar to the 12,492 seen for 6.5). Well
over 7,000 of those changes were merged after the first-half merge-window summary was
written, meaning that the latter part of the merge window brought many more
interesting changes.
The collective thoughts of the interwebz
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