Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956467/

Linus has released 6.7-rc8 for testing.

So as expected, pretty much nothing happened over the holiday week.
We’ve got literally just 45 files changed, and almost a third of
those files aren’t even kernel code (ie things like selftests,
scripting, Kconfig and maintainer file updates). And some of the
rest is prep-work and cleanups for future (real) changes.

But we do have a couple of real fixes in there, and I suspect we’ll
get a few more next week as people come back from their
food-induced torpor.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956454/

Version 6.0 of the Gnuplot plotting system
has been released.

Gnuplot has been supported and under active development since 1986.
This is the first new major version of gnuplot since the release of
version 5 in January 2015. It introduces extensions to the gnuplot
command language, an expanded collection of special and
complex-valued functions, additional 2D and 3D plotting styles, and
support for new output protocols.

See the
release notes for details.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956366/

Gentoo Linux is the prototypical source-based distribution, but there is
now a
binary installation option available as well.

To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience,
we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct
installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core
system and weekly updates – not so for amd64 and arm64
however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our
mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956303/

Version
1.75.0 of the Rust language has been released. Notable changes include
“async
fn and -> impl Trait in traits“, a pointer byte-offset
API, some compiler performance improvements, and a number of stabilized APIs.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956187/

The Debian project has completed a
general-resolution vote, adopting a statement expressing concern about
the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) pending in the European Union.

Even if only “commercial activities” are in the scope of CRA, the
Free Software community – and as a consequence, everybody – will
lose a lot of small projects. CRA will force many small enterprises
and most probably all self employed developers out of business
because they simply cannot fulfill the requirements imposed by
CRA. Debian and other Linux distributions depend on their work. If
accepted as it is, CRA will undermine not only an established
community but also a thriving market. CRA needs an exemption for
small businesses and, at the very least, solo-entrepreneurs

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956092/

The 6.7-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

Anyway, rc7 itself looks fairly normal. It’s actually a bit bigger
than rc6 was, but not hugely so, and nothing in here looks at all
strange. Please do give it a whirl if you have the time and the
energy, but let’s face it, I expect things to be very quiet and
this to be one of those “nothing happens” weeks. Because even if
you aren’t celebrating this time of year, you might take advantage
of the peace and quiet.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956082/

The 5.15.145 stable kernel has been
released. It consists mostly of fixes to the ksmbd subsystem, which has
been marked as broken due to (until now) a lack of support for the 5.15.x
kernels.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/956017/

Version
4.6.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include
a new “rgb primaries” module that “can be used for delicate color
corrections as well as creative color grading“, enhancements to the
sigmoid module, some performance improvements, and more. (LWN looked at darktable in 2022).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955970/

Unsurprisingly, Linus Torvalds has let
it be known that he will do a 6.7-rc8 release (rather than 6.7 final)
on December 31, thus avoiding opening the 6.8 merge window on New
Year’s Day.

Just FYI – my current plan is that -rc7 will happen this Saturday
(because I still follow the Finnish customs of Christmas _Eve_
being the important day, so Sunday I’ll be off), and then if
anything comes in that week – which it will do, even if networking
might be offline – I’ll do an rc8 the week after.

Then, unless anything odd happens, the final 6.7 release will be Jan
7th, and so the merge window for 6.8 will open Jan 8th.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955709/

Tooling for profiling the effects of memory usage and layout has always
lagged behind that for profiling processor activity, so Namhyung Kim’s patch set for data-type profiling
in perf is a welcome addition. It provides aggregated breakdowns of
memory accesses by data type that can inform structure layout and access
pattern changes. Existing tools have either, like heaptrack, focused on
profiling allocations, or, like perf mem, on accounting memory
accesses only at the address level. This new work builds on the latter,
using DWARF debugging information to correlate memory operations with their
source-level types.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955925/

The Rust Blog announces
the stabilization of a couple of trait features aimed at improving support
for async code:

Ever since the stabilization of RFC #1522 in Rust 1.26, Rust has
allowed users to write impl Trait as the return type of
functions (often called “RPIT”). This means that the function
returns “some type that implements Trait“. This is
commonly used to return closures, iterators, and other types that
are complex or impossible to write explicitly. […]

Starting in Rust 1.75, you can use return-position impl
Trait in trait (RPITIT) definitions and in trait impls. For
example, you could use this to write a trait method that returns an
iterator: […]

So what does all of this have to do with async functions? Well,
async functions are “just sugar” for functions that return
-> impl Future. Since these are now permitted in
traits, we also permit you to write traits that use async fn.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955132/

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 21, 2023 is available.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955832/

Version 8.2.0 of
the QEMU emulator is out. Changes include new emulations for virtio-sound
devices, universal flash storage devices, Xilinx Versai boards, and much
more.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/954535/

Yet another year has come to an end. Much to our dismay, 2023 did not, in
fact, happen exactly as we predicted back in
January. So it seems that, once again, we will have to go through the
process of looking at the predictions that we made and mocking each in
turn, before getting into what was missed altogether. A lot happened in
2023, not all of which was predictable.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955827/

The 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit will
be held May 13 to 15 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. The call
for proposals has already gone out, with a deadline of March 1.
“LSF/MM/BPF is an invitation-only technical workshop to map out
improvements to the Linux storage, filesystem, BPF, and memory management
subsystems that will make their way into the mainline kernel within the
coming years.”

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955812/

The
6.6.8,
6.1.69,
5.15.144,
5.10.205,
5.4.265,
4.19.303, and
4.14.334
stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of
important fixes.

Note that 5.15.145
is already in the review process, with a due date of December 22. It
consists almost exclusively of ksmbd patches in a flurry of backporting
that was seemingly inspired by the recent marking
of ksmbd as broken in 5.15.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955786/

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ansible and ansible-core), Gentoo (Minecraft Server and thunderbird), Mageia (fusiondirectory), Red Hat (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, opensc, and openssl), Slackware (libssh and mozilla), SUSE (avahi, firefox, ghostscript, gstreamer-plugins-bad, mariadb, openssh, openssl-1_1-livepatches, python-aiohttp, python-cryptography, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (libssh and openssh).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955691/

Version 4.2.0 of the Qubes OS distribution has been released; changes
include a switch to Xfce for the Fedora and Debian templates, a number of
rewritten graphical applications, PipeWire support, and more. See the release
notes for details. (Qubes OS was last covered here in 2021).

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955680/

OpenSSH
9.6 has been released. It includes some minor improvements and a fix
for the so-called Terrapin
attack.

While cryptographically novel, the security impact of this attack
is fortunately very limited as it only allows deletion of
consecutive messages, and deleting most messages at this stage of
the protocol prevents user authentication from proceeding and
results in a stuck connection.

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955679/

Version
121.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Along with the usual pile of
security fixes, this release add the ability to force links to be rendered
with underlines and use of Wayland by default if it is available: “This
brings support for touchpad & touchscreen gestures, swipe-to-nav,
per-monitor DPI settings, better graphics performance, and more.”