Version 3.1 of the Krita image editor is available. “Krita 3.1 is the result of half a year of intense work and contains many new features, performance improvements and bug fixes. It’s now possible to use render animations (using ffmpeg) to gif or various video formats. You can use a curve editor to animate properties. Soft-proofing was added for seeing how your artwork will look in print. A new color picker that allows selecting wide-gamut colors. There is also a new brush engine that paints fast on large canvases, a stop-based gradient editor.” See the release notes for more information.
Back in 2007, the announcement that AMD intended to reverse its longstanding position and create an upstream driver for its graphics processors was joyfully received by Linux users worldwide. As 2017 approaches, an attempt by AMD to merge a driver for an upcoming graphics chip has been rejected by the kernel’s graphics subsystem maintainer — a decision that engendered rather less joy. A look at this discussion reveals a pattern seen many times before; the positions and decisions taken can seem arbitrary to the wider world but they are not without their reasons and will, hopefully, lead to a better kernel in the long run.
Linus has released the 4.9 kernel, as expected. Some of the headline features in 4.9 include improved security with virtually mapped kernel stacks, the memory-protection keys system calls, the BBR congestion-control algorithm, support for the Greybus bus architecture, shared extents in the XFS filesystem (which will be used to support lightweight copy operations among other things), and much more. The code name has also been changed to “Roaring Lionus”. In the end, 16,216 non-merge changesets were pulled for the 4.9 release, making this development cycle the busiest ever by far.
The stable kernel machine continues to crank out updates; 4.8.14 and 4.4.38 are now available with another set of important fixes. These include, finally, the fix for CVE-2016-8655, a local-root exploit that has been getting some attention.
The maintainer model is deeply ingrained into the culture of the free-software community; for any bit of code, there is usually a developer (or a small group of developers) charged with that code’s maintenance. Good maintainers can help a project run smoothly, while poor maintainers can run things into the ground. What is to be done to save a project with the latter type of maintainer? Forking can be an option in some cases but, in many others, it’s not a practical alternative. The Debian project is currently discussing its approach to bad maintainers — a discussion which has taken a surprising turn.
James Bottomley has posted a tutorial on using the trusted platform module to store cryptographic keys. “The main thing that came out of this discussion was that a lot of this stack complexity can be hidden from users and we should concentrate on making the TPM ‘just work’ for all cryptographic functions where we have parallels in the existing security layers (like the keystore). One of the great advantages of the TPM, instead of messing about with USB pkcs11 tokens, is that it has a file format for TPM keys (I’ll explain this later) which can be used directly in place of standard private key files.”
The 4.9-rc8 kernel prepatch is out; the final 4.9 release will need one more week. “So if anybody has been following the git tree, it should come as no surprise that I ended up doing an rc8 after all: things haven’t been bad, but it also hasn’t been the complete quiet that would have made me go ‘no point in doing another week’.”
The Google security blog announces the OSS-Fuzz project, which performs continuous fuzz testing of free-software project repositories. “OSS-Fuzz has already found 150 bugs in several widely used open source projects (and churns ~4 trillion test cases a week). With your help, we can make fuzzing a standard part of open source development, and work with the broader community of developers and security testers to ensure that bugs in critical open source applications, libraries, and APIs are discovered and fixed.”
Version 5.5 of the Ardour audio editor has been released. “Among the notable new features are support for VST 2.4 plugins on OS X, the ability to have MIDI input follow MIDI track selection, support for Steinberg CC121, Avid Artist & Artist Mix Control surfaces, ‘fanning out’ of instrument outputs to new tracks/busses and the often requested ability to do horizontal zoom via vertical dragging on the rulers.”
Cyanogen Inc. has put out a terse press release announcing the departure of founder (and CyanogenMod creator) Steve Kondik. See this rather less terse Android Police article for Kondik’s view of the matter. The future of the CyanogenMod distribution seems unclear at this point; if it goes forward, it may have to do so with a different name.
As covered here in January, changes to the GNU C Library’s memory-allocation routines have broken the “unexec” method used to build the Emacs editor. Fixing this problem has proved to be more challenging than originally thought; that issue has now come to a head in a disagreement that could cost the Emacs community one of its maintainers.
Harald Welte looks back at the Openmoko phone with a ten-year perspective (and an almost unreadable low-contrast web page). “So yes, the smartphone world is much more restricted, locked-down and proprietary than it was back in the Openmoko days. If we had been more successful then, that world might be quite different today. It was a lost opportunity to make the world embrace more freedom in terms of software and hardware.”
The 4.9-rc7 kernel prepatch is out. Linus says that things are shaping up and it is possible, but perhaps not likely, that the final 4.9 release will happen on December 4. “I basically reserve the right to make up my mind next weekend.”
The Fedora 25 release is now available “The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 25, the next big step our journey into the containerized, modular future!” See the announcement and the release notes for details on the many changes in this release.
Fedora Magazine has a brief overview of the changes to be found in the workstation version of the Fedora 25 release. “Wayland now replaces the old X11 display server by default. Its goal is to provide a smoother, richer experience when navigating Fedora Workstation. Like all software, there may still be some bugs. You can still choose the old X11 server if required.”
Linus has released the 4.9-rc6 kernel prepatch for testing. “We’re getting further in the rc series, and while things have stayed pretty calm, I’m not sure if we’re quite there yet. There’s a few outstanding issues that just shouldn’t be issues at rc6 time, so we’ll just have to see. This may be one of those releases that have an rc8, which considering the size of 4.9 is perhaps not that unusual.”
Linus has released the 4.9-rc6 kernel prepatch for testing. “We’re getting further in the rc series, and while things have stayed pretty calm, I’m not sure if we’re quite there yet. There’s a few outstanding issues that just shouldn’t be issues at rc6 time, so we’ll just have to see. This may be one of those releases that have an rc8, which considering the size of 4.9 is perhaps not that unusual.”
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