Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025232/

In 2023, Fujita Tomonori

wrote a Rust version of the existing driver for the
Asix AX88796B embedded Ethernet controller. At slightly more than 100 lines,
it’s about as simple as a driver can be, and therefore is a useful touchstone for
the differences between writing Rust and C in the kernel. Looking at the Rust
syntax, types, and APIs used by the driver and contrasting them with the C
version will help illustrate those differences.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1027271/

Kernel versions
6.15.4,
6.12.35,
6.6.95,
6.1.142,
5.15.186,
5.10.239, and
5.4.295 have all been released.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1027251/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (freeradius and icu), Fedora (clamav, glow, libssh, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA, perl-CryptX, podman, trafficserver, and xorg-x11-server), Mageia (gdk-pixbuf2.0 and thunderbird), Red Hat (osbuild-composer and weldr-client), SUSE (afterburn, google-osconfig-agent, libblockdev, pam, python-tornado6, screen, and yelp-xsl), and Ubuntu (libxslt and python-pip).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024202/

The Linux kernel is seeing a steady accumulation of Rust code. As it becomes
more prevalent, maintainers may want to know how to read, review, and test the
Rust code that relates to their areas of expertise. Just as kernel C code is
different from user-space C code, so too is kernel Rust code somewhat different
from user-space Rust code. That fact makes Rust’s

extensive documentation of
less use than it otherwise would be, and means that potential contributors with
user-space experience will need some additional instruction.
This article is the first in a multi-part series aimed at helping existing
kernel contributors become familiar with Rust, and helping existing Rust
programmers become familiar with what the kernel does differently from the
typical Rust project.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026248/

Debian’s long-awaited tag2upload service is
now ready for Debian maintainers to use in some circumstances. Tag2upload makes it easier for maintainers to upload packages, by allowing them to push a signed Git commit that will automatically be picked up and built, instead of pushing a build from their local machine. LWN covered the
discussion around the service in July of last year. With the timing of its readiness, it’s likely to become more useful once Debian 13 (“trixie”) is released.

Be very aware of the freeze! Do not just upload to unstable as
your first test! Uploads to unstable, targeting trixie, can be
done with tag2upload – but in most cases you will probably want to
upload the same package to experimental first.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1026281/

Security updates have been issued by SUSE (apache2-mod_security2, augeas, ghc-pandoc, gstreamer, ignition, kernel, libblockdev, libxml2, nodejs20, openssl-3, pam_pkcs11, perl, python3, systemd, ucode-intel, webkit2gtk3, and xen) and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4,
linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4,
linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-aws-fips, linux-gcp-fips, python3.13, python3.12, and roundcube).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024747/

The fundamental concept of checkpoint/restore is elegant: capture a
process’s state and resurrect it later, perhaps elsewhere. Checkpointing
meticulously records a process’s memory, open files, CPU state, and more into a
snapshot. Restoration then reconstructs the process from this state. This
established technique faces new challenges with GPU-accelerated applications,
where low-latency restoration is crucial for
fault
tolerance, live migration, and
fast startups. Recently, the restore process for AMD GPUs has been redesigned to
eliminate substantial bottlenecks.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1025354/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, glibc, kernel, and mod_security), Fedora (chromium, gh, mingw-icu, nginx-mod-modsecurity, python3.10, python3.9, thunderbird, valkey, and yarnpkg), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, glibc, grafana-pcp, kernel, libxml2, mod_security, nodejs:20, and thunderbird), SUSE (audiofile, helm, kubernetes-old, kubernetes1.23, kubernetes1.24, libcryptopp, postgresql15, thunderbird, and valkey), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia-tegra-igx).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023646/

Smatch is a GPL-licensed
static-analysis tool for C that has a lot of specialized checks for the kernel. Smatch
has been used in the kernel for more than 20 years; Dan
Carpenter, its primary author, decided last year that some details of its plugin system
were due for a rewrite. He spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about his work on
Smatch, the changes to its implementation, and how those changes enabled him to easily
add additional checks for locking bugs in the kernel.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023075/

The 6.16 merge window

closed on June 8, as
expected, containing 12,899 non-merge commits. This is
slightly more than the 6.15 merge window, but well in line with expectations.
7,353 of those were merged after
the summary of the first half of the merge
window was written. More detailed statistics can be found in
the LWN kernel source database.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024317/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, openssh, and python36:3.6), Debian (edk2, libfile-find-rule-perl, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (emacs, libvpx, perl-FCGI, and seamonkey), Mageia (cifs-utils), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, gvisor-tap-vsock, krb5, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, protobuf, and thunderbird), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (gimp, gnutls, haproxy, opensaml, openssh, openvpn, python-cryptography, python-tornado, python311-nh3, and python311-selenium), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-bad1.0 and linux-fips).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023306/

The European Union’s

Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) has caused a stir in the
software-development world. Thanks to advocacy by the Eclipse Foundation, Open
Source Initiative, Linux Foundation, Mozilla, and others, open-source software
projects generally have minimal requirements under the CRA
— but nothing to do with law is ever quite
so simple. Marta Rybczyńska spoke at Linaro Connect 2025 about the impact of the
CRA on the open-source ecosystem, with an emphasis on the importance of
understanding a project’s role under the CRA. She later participated in a panel
discussion with Joakim Bech, Kate Stewart, and Mike Bursell about how the CRA
would impact embedded open-source development.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022648/

Cong Wang and Daniel Borkmann each led session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about their respective
plans to speed up networking in the Linux kernel. Both sessions described ways
to remove unnecessary operations in the networking stack, but they focused on
different areas. Wang spoke about using BPF to speed up socket operations,
while Borkmann spoke about eliminating the overhead of networking
operations on virtual machines.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022889/

This year’s

Linaro Connect in Lisbon, Portugal featured a number of talks about the use of
open-source components in safety-critical systems. Kate Stewart gave a keynote on the topic
on the first day of the conference. In it, she highlighted several projects that
have been working to pursue safety certification and spoke about the importance of
being able to trace software’s origins to safety. In a talk on the second day, Roberto
Bagnara shared his experience with working on one of those projects, the Xen
hypervisor, to conform to a formal set of rules for safety-critical code.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023259/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, ghostscript, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libsoup3, mingw-freetype, perl, ruby, sqlite, thunderbird, unbound, valkey, and xz), Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, libavif, linux-6.1, modsecurity-apache, mydumper, systemd, and thunderbird), Fedora (coreutils, dnsdist, docker-buildx, maturin, mingw-python-flask, mingw-python-flit-core, ruff, rust-hashlink, rust-rusqlite, and thunderbird), Red Hat (pcs), SUSE (augeas, brltty, brotli, ca-certificates-mozilla, dnsdist, glibc, grub2, kernel, libsoup, libsoup2, libxml2, open-vm-tools, perl, postgresql13, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, python-cryptography, python-httpcore, python-h11, python311, runc, s390-tools, slurm, slurm_20_11, slurm_22_05, slurm_23_02, slurm_24_11, tomcat, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux-aws).

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022512/

As of this writing, 5,546 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline
kernel repository for the 6.16 release. This is a bit less than half of the
total commits for 6.15, so the merge window is well on its way. Read on for our
summary of the first half of the 6.16 merge window.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022034/

Mahé Tardy led two sessions about some of the challenges that he, Kornilios Kourtis,
and John Fastabend have run into in their work on

Tetragon (Apache-licensed BPF-based security monitoring software)
at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The session
prompted discussion about the feasibility of letting BPF programs
send data over the network, as well as potential new kfuncs to let BPF firewalls
send TCP reset packets. Tardy presented several possible ways that these could
be accomplished.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021825/

Srinivas Narayana led a remote session about extending

Agni to prove the correctness of
the BPF verifier’s handling of different execution paths as part of the Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. The problem of ensuring the
correctness of path exploration
is much more difficult than the problem of
ensuring the correctness of arithmetic operations
(which was

the subject of the previous session), however. Narayana’s plan to
tackle the problem makes use of a mixture of specialized techniques — and may
need some assistance from the BPF developers to make it feasible at all.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020664/

The BPF verifier is an increasingly complex and security-critical piece of code.
When the kinds of people who are apt to work on BPF see a situation like that,
they naturally question whether it’s possible to use formal verification to
ensure that the implementation of the code in question is correct. Santosh
Nagarakatte led the first of two extra-long sessions in the BPF track
of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit
about his team’s work formally verifying the BPF verifier with a
custom tool called

Agni.

Post Syndicated from daroc original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020266/

Ihor Solodrai has been working on the BPF subsystem’s continuous-integration
(CI) testing for the last six months. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he remotely shared
an update on his work, and solicited feedback on how the tests could be further
improved. Much of the work he’s done has been specific to the BPF subsystem, but
some is more generic and could potentially be of use to other subsystems. He
also shared some general lessons learned from working on the BPF CI tests.