All posts by corbet

[$] DNF5 delayed

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941154/

It is fair to say that the DNF package
manager is not the favorite tool of many Fedora users. It was brought
in as a replacement for Yum but got off to a
rather rocky start; DNF has
stabilized over the years, though and the complaints have subsided. That can only
mean one thing: it must be time to throw it away and start over from the
beginning. The replacement, called DNF5, was slated to be a part of the
Fedora 39 release, due in October, but that is not going to happen.

Security updates for Friday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/942076/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, rar, and unrar-nonfree), Fedora (microcode_ctl, trafficserver, and webkitgtk), SUSE (ImageMagick, kernel, nodejs16, nodejs18, postgresql12, postgresql15, re2c, and samba), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, haproxy, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm,
linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency,
linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15,
linux-raspi, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, poppler, and zziplib).

SUSE to be acquired, taken private

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941985/

SUSE’s long story of corporate ownership is gaining a new chapter; the
company has announced
that it’s majority shareholder (Marcel LUX III SARL) will acquiring the
remaining shares, and will take the company private and off of the stock
exchange. “SUSE’s Management Board and Supervisory Board support the
strategic opportunity from delisting of the company as it will allow SUSE
to focus fully on its operational priorities and execution of its long-term
strategy.”

[$] Out-of-memory victim selection with BPF

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941614/

In its default configuration, the Linux kernel will allow processes to
allocate more memory than the system can actually provide; this policy
enables better utilization of physical memory and works just fine — most of
the time. On occasions, though, the kernel may find itself unable to
provide memory that processes may think already belongs to them. If the
situation gets bad enough, the only solution (short of rebooting) is to
declare a sort of memory bankruptcy and write off some of the kernel’s
debts by killing one or more processes. Over the years, a great deal of
effort has gone into heuristics to select the processes that the user is
least likely to miss. This problem is still clearly not solved to
everybody’s satisfaction, though, so it was only a matter of time before
somebody introduced a way to select the out-of-memory (OOM) victim using
BPF.

HashiCorp’s license change

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941799/

Readers have been pointing us to HashiCorp’s announcement
that it is moving to its own “Business Source License” for some of its
(formerly) open-source products. Like other companies (example) that have taken this path, HashiCorp
is removing the freedom to use its products commercially in ways that it
sees as competitive. This is, in a real sense, an old and tiresome story.

The lessons to be drawn from this change are old as well. One is to beware
of depending on any platform, free or proprietary, that is controlled by a
single company. It is a rare company that will not try to take advantage
of that control at some point.

The other is to beware of contributor license agreements. HashiCorp’s
agreement used
to read that it existed “to ensure that our projects remain licensed
under Free and Open Source licenses“; the current version doesn’t say that
anymore. But both versions give HashiCorp the right to play exactly this
kind of game with any code contributed by outsiders. Developers who were
contributing to a free-software project will now have their code used in a
rather more proprietary setting. When a company is given the right to take
somebody else’s code proprietary, many of them will eventually make use of
that right.

Debian turns 30

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941744/

On August 16, 1993, Ian Murdock announced
a new distribution to the comp.os.linux.development Usenet newsgroup:

This is just to announce the imminent completion of a brand-new
Linux release, which I’m calling the Debian Linux Release. This is
a release that I have put together basically from scratch; in other
words, I didn’t simply make some changes to SLS and call it a new
release. I was inspired to put together this release after running
SLS and generally being dissatisfied with much of it, and after
much altering of SLS I decided that it would be easier to start
from scratch. The base system is now virtually complete (though I’m
still looking around to make sure that I grabbed the most recent
sources for everything), and I’d like to get some feedback before I
add the “fancy” stuff.

After 30 years, Debian is still going strong.

Debian adds LoongArch support

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941743/

The Debian project has added
the LoongArch architecture to its ports collection.

After an initial manual bootstrap of roughly 200 packages, two
buildds are now building packages for the newly added “loong64”
port with the help of qemu-user. After enough packages have been
built for the port to be self-hosting, we’re planning to replace
these two buildds with real hardware hosted at Loongson.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941722/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (datatables.js and openssl), Fedora (ghostscript, java-11-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, microcode_ctl, and xen), Red Hat (redhat-ds:11), SUSE (java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, krb5, pcre2, and perl-HTTP-Tiny), and Ubuntu (gstreamer1.0, mysql-8.0, tiff, and webkit2gtk).

Maintainers Summit call for topics

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941660/

The 2023 Maintainers Summit will be held on November 16 in Richmond, VA,
immediately after the Linux Plumbers
Conference.

As in previous years, the Maintainers Summit is invite-only, where
the primary focus will be process issues around Linux Kernel
Development. It will be limited to 30 invitees and a handful of
sponsored attendees.

The call for
topics has just gone out, with the first invitations to be sent within
a couple of weeks or so.

Nuta: Exploring the internals of Linux v0.01

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941591/

For those who find the 6.x kernel intimidating, Seiya Nuta has written a look at the 0.01
kernel, which reflects a simpler time.

By the way, there’s an interesting comment about the scheduler:

    *  'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There
    * probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well
    * in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc).

Yes it’s indeed good code. Unfortunately (or fortunately), this
prophecy is false. Linux became one of most practical and
performant kernel which has introduced many new scheduling
improvements and algorithms over the years, like Completely Fair
Scheduler (CFS).

[$] A new futex API

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/940944/

The Linux fast user-space mutex (“futex”) subsystem debuted with the 2.6.0
kernel; it provides a mechanism that can be used to implement user-space
locking. Since futexes avoid calling into the kernel whenever possible,
they can indeed be fast, especially in the uncontended case. The API used
to access futexes has never been seen as one of Linux’s strongest points,
though, so there has long been a desire to improve it. This patch
series from Peter Zijlstra shows what the future of futexes may look
like.

Kernel prepatch 6.5-rc6

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941405/

The 6.5-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for
testing.

So apart from the regularly scheduled hardware mitigation patches,
everything looks fairly normal. And I guess the hw mitigation is to
be considered normal too, apart from the inevitable fixup patches
it then causes because the embargo keeps us from testing it widely
and keeps it from all our public automation. Sigh.

[$] Following up on file-position locking

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/940808/

LWN recently covered a discussion on
file-position locking that demonstrated the hazards that can result
from unexpected concurrency. It turns out that this discussion had not yet
fully run its course. Since that article was written, additional changes
intended to address a performance regression evolved into a core virtual
filesystem (VFS) layer API change to carry out some much-delayed housecleaning.

The Open Enterprise Linux Association

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/941091/

The Open Enterprise Linux Association
has announced its
existence. It is a collaboration between CIQ (Rocky Linux), Oracle,
and SUSE to provide an RHEL-compatible distribution.

Starting later this year, OpenELA will provide sources necessary
for downstreams compatible with RHEL to exist, with initial focus
on RHEL versions EL8, EL9 and possibly EL7. The project is
committed to ensuring the continued availability of OpenELA sources
to the community indefinitely.

OpenELA’s core tenets, reflecting the spirit of the project,
include full compliance with this existing standard, swift updates
and secure fixes, transparency, community, and ensuring the
resource remains free and redistributable for all.

[$] An ioctl() call to detect memory writes

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/940704/

It is the kernel’s business to know when a process’s memory has been
written to; among other things, this knowledge is needed to determine which
pages can
be immediately reclaimed or to properly write dirty pages to backing store.
Sometimes, though, user space also needs access to this information in a
reliable and fast manner. This
patch series from Muhammad Usama Anjum adds a new ioctl() call
for this purpose; using it requires repurposing an existing system call in
an unusual way, though.