All posts by corbet

Debian statement on the Cyber Resilience Act

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

Kernel prepatch 6.7-rc7

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.

The 6.7 kernel will be released on January 7

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.

[$] Data-type profiling for perf

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.

Announcing `async fn` and return-position `impl Trait` in traits (Rust Blog)

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.

LSFMM+BPF 2024 call for proposals

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.”

Seven stable kernels

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.

Security updates for Wednesday

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).

OpenSSH 9.6 released

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.

Firefox 121.0 released

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.”

[$] The intersection of mlx5, netdev, and lockdown

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955001/

The NVIDIA Mellanox ConnectX HW family of adapters is a complex beast,
supporting networking, InfiniBand, RDMA, and more. As a result, the mlx5
kernel driver that supports this hardware is also complex, as is the
interface that it provides to user space. The mlx5 developers have, for a
while now, been proposing
the addition of a new control interface, in the form of a separate virtual
device exported by the kernel, that would make vast amounts of debugging
information available. This driver has encountered some significant
opposition on its way toward the mainline, though, raising a number of
questions about appropriate interfaces and when subsystem maintainers have
veto power over submissions.

Min: sched_ext: a BPF-extensible scheduler class (Part 1)

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/955481/

Changwoo Min provides
an introduction to the sched_ext scheduling class:

Sched_ext was proposed to address the problems mentioned above. It
allows users to write a custom scheduling policy using BPF without
modifying the kernel code. You don’t need to struggle to maintain
the out-of-tree custom scheduler. In addition, BPF provides a safe
kernel programming environment. In particular, the BPF verifier
ensures that your custom scheduler has neither a memory bug nor an
infinite loop. Also, if your custom scheduler misbehaves — like
failing to schedule a task for too long (say 30 seconds), the
kernel portion of sched_ext kills your custom scheduler and falls
back to the default kernel scheduler (CFS or EEVDF). Last but not
least, you can update the BPF scheduler without reinstalling the
kernel and rebooting a server.

(LWN looked at sched_ext in February 2023).