All posts by corbet

[$] What remains to be done for proxy execution

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953438/

The kernel’s deadline scheduling class
offers a solution to a number of realtime (or generally latency-sensitive)
problems, but it is also resistant to the usual solutions for the priority-inversion
problem. The development community has been pursuing proxy execution as a
solution to a few scheduling challenges, including this one; the problem is
difficult and progress has been slow. LWN last looked at proxy execution in June; at the 2023 Linux
Plumbers Conference
, John Stultz gave an overview of proxy execution,
the current status of the work, and the remaining problems to solve.

[$] A Nouveau graphics driver update

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953144/

Support for NVIDIA graphics processors has traditionally been a sore point
for Linux users; NVIDIA has not felt the need to cooperate with the kernel
community or make free drivers available, and the reverse-engineered
Nouveau driver has often struggled to keep up with product releases. There
have, however, been signs of improvement in recent years. At the 2023 Linux
Plumbers Conference
, graphics subsystem maintainer Dave Airlie provided
an update on the state of support for NVIDIA GPUs and what remains to be
done.

[$] A Rust implementation of Android’s Binder

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953116/

The Android system was once famous for extensive, out-of-tree kernel
enhancements. Many of those have been eliminated or upstreamed over
the years, bringing Android much closer to the mainline kernel. One
significant component in the “upstreamed” category is Binder, an
interprocess communication mechanism that is used only by Android. There
are a number of factors that make Binder a good candidate for rewriting in
the Rust language; at the 2023 Linux
Plumbers Conference
, Carlos Llamas and Alice Rhyl described the
motivation behind and implementation of a rewrite of Binder in Rust.

LibreQoS 1.4 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953286/

The LibreQoS project
describes itself as:

LibreQoS is a Quality of Experience (QoE) Smart Queue Management
(SQM) system designed for Internet Service Providers to optimize
the flow of their network traffic and thus reduce bufferbloat, keep
the network responsive, and improve the end-user experience.

Version
1.4
of LibreQoS was released on November 17. “Version 1.4 is a
huge milestone. A whole new back-end, new GUI, 30%+ performance
improvements, support for single-interface mode.
”

Roundcube becomes part of Nextcloud

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953228/

Nextcloud has announced
the “acquisition” of the Roundcube webmail system.

As a product, Roundcube has an established path to success on its
own. With opportunities remaining to be explored, a direct merger
between Roundcube and Nextcloud is not planned. Neither will
Roundcube replace Nextcloud Mail or the other way around. The
products both have strengths and weaknesses and as open source
products they already do share some underlying libraries and tools,
but remain independent offerings for overlapping but different use
scenarios. Nextcloud Mail will evolve as it is, focused on being
used naturally within Nextcloud. Roundcube will continue to serve
its active and new users as a stand-alone secure mail client.

Security updates for Wednesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953226/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-bad1.0 and postgresql-multicorn), Fedora (golang-github-nats-io, golang-github-nats-io-jwt-2, golang-github-nats-io-nkeys, golang-github-nats-io-streaming-server, libcap, nats-server, openvpn, and python-geopandas), Mageia (kernel), Red Hat (c-ares, curl, fence-agents, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libxml2, pixman, postgresql, and tigervnc), SUSE (python-azure-storage-queue, python-Twisted, and python3-Twisted), and Ubuntu (afflib, ec2-hibinit-agent, linux-nvidia-6.2, linux-starfive-6.2, and poppler).

Security updates for Tuesday

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/953099/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cryptojs, fastdds, mediawiki, and minizip), Fedora (chromium, kubernetes, and thunderbird), Mageia (lilypond, mariadb, and packages), Red Hat (firefox, linux-firmware, and thunderbird), SUSE (compat-openssl098, gstreamer-plugins-bad, squashfs, squid, thunderbird, vim, and xerces-c), and Ubuntu (libtommath, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-oracle, perl, and python3.8, python3.10, python3.11).

[$] A discussion on kernel-maintainer pain points

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/952146/

A regular feature of the Kernel Maintainers Summit is a session where Linus
Torvalds discusses the problems that he has been encountering. In recent
years, though, there have been relatively few of those problems, so this
year he turned things around a bit by asking
the community
what problems it was seeing instead. He then addressed
them at the Summit in a session covering aspects of the development
community, including feedback to maintainers, diversity (or the
lack thereof), and more.

Pipewire 1.0 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/952848/

PipeWire, the audio/video bus meant to
replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other systems, has reached
1.0
. In celebration, Fedora Magazine is running an
interview with PipeWire creator Wim Taymans
.

PipeWire is an IPC mechanism for multimedia. The most interesting
stuff will happen in the session manager, the modules, the
applications and the tools around all this. I hope to see more cool
tools to route video and set up video filters etc.

PipeWire 1.0 released

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/952848/

PipeWire, the audio/video bus meant to
replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other systems, has reached
1.0
. In celebration, Fedora Magazine is running an
interview with PipeWire creator Wim Taymans
.

PipeWire is an IPC mechanism for multimedia. The most interesting
stuff will happen in the session manager, the modules, the
applications and the tools around all this. I hope to see more cool
tools to route video and set up video filters etc.

[$] Reducing kernel-maintainer burnout

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/952034/

Overstressed maintainers are a constant topic of conversation throughout
the open-source community. Kernel maintainers have been complaining more
loudly than usual recently about overwork and stress. The problems that
maintainers are facing are clear; what to do about them is rather less so.
A session at the 2023 Maintainers Summit took up the topic yet again with
the hope of finding some solutions; there may be answers, perhaps even
within the kernel community, but a general solution still seems distant.

Happy Thanksgiving

Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/952354/

November 23 is the US Thanksgiving holiday; as is our tradition, we will
not be publishing an LWN Weekly Edition this week as we will be far too
busy eating. We wish a good holiday to all of our readers (whether they
celebrate it or not); the weekly edition will return on November 30.