Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1057548/

The Ardour digital-audio-workstation (DAW)
project has announced the
release of version 9.0.

This is a major release for the project, seeing several substantive new features that users have asked for over a long period of time. Region FX, clip recording, a touch-sensitive GUI, pianoroll windows, clip editing and more, not to mention dozens of bug fixes, new MIDI binding maps, improved GUI performance on macOS (for most) …

We expect to get feedback on some of the major new features in this release, and plan to take that into account as we improve and refine them and the rest of Ardour going forward. We have no doubt that there will be both delight and disappointment with certain things – rather than assume that we don’t know what we’re doing, please leave us feedback on the forums so that Ardour gets better over time. Those of you new to our clip launching implementation might care to read up on the differences with Ableton Live.

In the coming weeks, we’ll begin to sketch out what we have planned next for Ardour, in addition to responding to the feedback we get on this 9.0 release.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1057381/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (brotli, curl, kernel, python-wheel, and python3.12), Debian (containerd), Fedora (gnupg2, pgadmin4, phpunit10, phpunit11, phpunit12, phpunit8, phpunit9, and yarnpkg), Mageia (expat), Oracle (qemu-kvm and util-linux), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, opentelemetry-collector, and python3.12-wheel), SUSE (abseil-cpp, dpdk, freerdp, glib2, ImageMagick, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-1_8_0-openj9, java-1_8_0-openjdk, java-21-openj9, kernel, libsoup, libsoup-3_0-0, openssl-3, patch, python-Django, rekor, rizin, udisks2, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (gh, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke,
linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg,
linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency,
linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-tegra,
linux-nvidia-tegra-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.17, linux-oracle,
linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle,
linux-oracle-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-realtime, linux-intel-iot-realtime, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8, linux-raspi-realtime).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1056387/

The robust
futex kernel API is a way for a user-space program to ensure that the
locks it holds are properly cleaned up when it exits. But the API suffers
from a number of different problems, as André Almeida described in a session in the
“Gaming on
Linux” microconference at the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo.
He had some ideas for a new API that would solve many of those problems,
which he wanted to discuss with attendees; there is a
difficult-to-trigger race condition that he wanted to talk about too.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1057256/

Version 26.2 of the LibreOffice
office suite has been released.

LibreOffice 26.2 is focused on improvements that make a difference in daily work and brings better performance, smoother interaction with complex documents and improved compatibility with files created in other office software. Whether you’re writing reports, managing spreadsheets, or preparing presentations, the experience feels more responsive and reliable.

LibreOffice has always been about giving users control. LibreOffice 26.2 continues that tradition by strengthening support for open document standards, and ensuring long-term access to your files, without subscriptions, license restrictions, or data collection. Your documents stay yours – forever.

More information can be found in the release notes
for LibreOffice 26.2.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1057247/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird), Fedora (openqa, os-autoinst, python-jupytext, python-python-multipart, rust-sequoia-keystore-server, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-sq, rust-sequoia-sqv, and xen), Oracle (curl, kernel, net-snmp, python3, and python3.12), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, fence-agents, golang, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, opentelemetry-collector, podman, python-s3transfer, python-wheel, and resource-agents), SUSE (alloy, chromium, cockpit-podman, cockpit-subscriptions, dpdk, elemental-register, elemental-toolkit, glib2, glibc, gpg2, ImageMagick, imagemagick, jasper, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libheif, libmlt++, libpng16, libsodium, libsoup, libvirt, openssl-3, openvpn, php8, postgresql16, postgresql17 and postgresql18, protobuf, python-FontTools, python-fonttools, python-h2, python-python-multipart, python-urllib3, python-wheel, python311-PyNaCl, trivy, ucode-amd, udisks2, unbound, util-linux, wireshark, and xkbcomp), and Ubuntu (emacs, freerdp2, glibc, imagemagick, mysql-8.0, pagure, python-django, python-filelock, python-internetarchive, and python-keystonemiddleware).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1057047/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, iperf3, kernel, kernel-rt, openssl, osbuild-composer, php:8.2, python3, util-linux, and wireshark), Debian (clamav and xrdp), Fedora (gimp and openttd), Mageia (docker-containerd), Oracle (gimp:2.8, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana-pcp, image-builder, iperf3, kernel, openssl, osbuild-composer, php, php:8.2, php:8.3, python3.9, util-linux, and wireshark), SUSE (cockpit-subscriptions, elemental-register, elemental-toolkit, glibc, gpg2, logback, openssl-1_1, python-urllib3, ucode-amd, and unbound), and Ubuntu (inetutils, libpng1.6, mysql-8.0, mysql-8.4, openjdk-17, openjdk-17-crac, openjdk-21, openjdk-21-crac, openjdk-25, openjdk-25-crac, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, and thunderbird).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1056923/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (iperf3, kernel, and php), Debian (ceph, pillow, pyasn1, python-django, and python-tornado), Fedora (bind9-next, cef, chromium, fontforge, java-21-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk, mingw-python-urllib3, mingw-python-wheel, nodejs20, nodejs22, nodejs24, opencc, openssl, python-wheel, and qownnotes), Red Hat (binutils, gcc-toolset-13-binutils, gcc-toolset-14-binutils, gcc-toolset-15-binutils, java-1.8.0-openjdk, and java-25-openjdk), Slackware (expat), SUSE (bind, cacti, cacti-spine, chromedriver, chromium, dirmngr, fontforge-20251009, glib2, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, govulncheck-vulndb, icinga2, ImageMagick, kernel, logback, openCryptoki, openssl-1_1, python311-djangorestframework, python311-pypdf, python314, python315, qemu, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4,
linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm and linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-gcp-fips).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1055391/

Phones running Linux are ubiquitous these days and it has been that way
since Android started working toward dominance in the smartphone market.
Unfortunately, Android has slowly increased its freedom-unfriendliness and
has become something of a privacy nightmare. In a talk entitled “We need
an open-source phone OS” at Open
Source Summit Japan 2025, Luca Weiss described the smartphone landscape
and gave an overview of postmarketOS as an alternative Linux
operating system for mobile handsets.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1054228/

As part of the process of writing man pages for the “new” mount API, which has been available in the
kernel since 2019, Aleksa Sarai encountered a number of places where the fsconfig()
system call—for configuring filesystems before mounting—needs to be cleaned up. In the 2025 Linux Plumbers Conference
(LPC) session
that he led, Sarai wanted to discuss some of the problems he found,
including at least one with security implications. The idea of the session
was for him to describe the various bugs and ambiguities that he had found,
but he also wanted attendees to raise other problems they had with the
system call.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1054258/

Paul Kehrer and Alex Gaynor, maintainers of the Python cryptography module, have put out some strongly
worded criticism of OpenSSL. It
comes from a talk they gave at the OpenSSL conference in October 2025 (YouTube video). The
post goes into a lot of detail about the problems with the OpenSSL code
base and testing, which has led the cryptography team to
reconsider using the library. “The mistakes we see in OpenSSL’s
development have become so significant that we believe substantial changes
are required — either to OpenSSL, or to our reliance on it.” They go
further in the conclusion:

First, we will no longer require OpenSSL implementations for new functionality. Where we deem it desirable, we will add new APIs that are only on LibreSSL/BoringSSL/AWS-LC. Concretely, we expect to add ML-KEM and ML-DSA APIs that are only available with LibreSSL/BoringSSL/AWS-LC, and not with OpenSSL.

Second, we currently statically link a copy of OpenSSL in our wheels (binary artifacts). We are beginning the process of looking into what would be required to change our wheels to link against one of the OpenSSL forks.

If we are able to successfully switch to one of OpenSSL’s forks for our binary wheels, we will begin considering the circumstances under which we would drop support for OpenSSL entirely.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1053018/

Lossless data compression is an important tool for reducing the storage
requirements of the world’s ever-growing data sets. Yann Collet developed
the LZ4
algorithm and designed the Zstandard (or Zstd)
algorithm; he came to the 2025
Open Source Summit Japan in Tokyo to talk about where data compression
goes from here. It turns out that we have reached a point where
general-purpose algorithms are only going to provide limited improvement;
for significant increases in compression, while keeping computation costs
within reason for data-center use, turning to format-specific techniques
will be needed.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1053595/

On her blog, Julia Evans writes about
improving Git documentation, including a new data
model man page she wrote with Marie
LeBlanc Flanagan, and updates to the pages for several other Git sub-commands
(add, checkout, push, and pull). As
part of the process, she asked Git users to describe problems they had run into
in the documentation, which helped guide the changes that she made.

I’m excited about this because understanding how Git organizes its commit and branch data has really helped me reason about how Git works over the years, and I think it’s important to have a short (1600 words!) version of the data model that’s accurate.

The “accurate” part turned out to not be that easy: I knew the basics of how Git’s data model worked, but during the review process I learned some new details and had to make quite a few changes (for example how merge conflicts are stored in the staging area).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1051430/

At the 2025 Linux Plumbers
Conference (LPC), held in Tokyo in mid-December, Changwoo Min led a session on what
he has learned while developing the
“latency-criticality
aware virtual deadline” (LAVD) scheduler, which is aimed at gaming
workloads. The session was part of the Gaming
on Linux microconference, which is a new entrant into LPC; organizers
hope to see it return next year in
Prague and, presumably, beyond. LAVD uses the extensible scheduler class (sched_ext) and has
the primary goal of minimizing stuttering
in games;
it is implemented in a combination of BPF and Rust.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049976/

At Open
Source Summit Japan 2025, Erin McKean talked about the challenges to
producing good project documentation, along with some tooling that can help
guide the process toward success. It is a problem that many projects
struggle with and one that her employer, Google, gained a lot of experience
with from its now-concluded Season of Docs
initiative. Through that program, more than 200 case studies of
documentation projects were gathered that were mined for common problems
and solutions, which led to the tools and techniques that McKean described.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1047238/

Dictionaries are ubiquitous in Python code; they are the data structure of
choice for a wide variety of tasks. But dictionaries are mutable, which
makes them problematic for sharing data in concurrent code. Python has
added various concurrency features to the language over the last decade or
so—async, free threading without the global interpreter lock
(GIL), and independent subinterpreters—but users must work out their own
solution for an immutable dictionary that can be safely shared by
concurrent code. There are existing modules that could be used, but a recent proposal, PEP 814 (“Add frozendict
built-in type”), looks to bring the feature to the language itself.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1049111/

The Django Python web
framework project has announced
the release of Django 6.0 including many new features, as can be seen in
the release
notes. Some highlights include template partials for modularizing
templates, a flexible task framework for running background tasks, a
modernized email API, and a Content
Security Policy (CSP) feature that provides the ability to “easily configure and enforce browser-level security policies to protect against content injection“.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1048596/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (krita and tryton-server), Oracle (bind9.18, ipa, kernel, libssh, redis, redis:7, sqlite, sssd, and vim), Slackware (cups), SUSE (containerd, cups, curl, dovecot24, git-bug, gitea-tea, glib2, grub2, himmelblau, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libmicrohttpd, libvirt, pnpm, powerpc-utils, python311, python313, redis, rnp, runc, sssd, tomcat11, unbound, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (cups, libxml2, openvpn, and webkit2gtk).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1048448/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kdeconnect, libssh, and samba), Fedora (7zip, docker-buildkit, and docker-buildx), Oracle (bind, buildah, cups, delve and golang, expat, firefox, gimp, go-rpm-macros, haproxy, kernel, lasso, libsoup, libtiff, mingw-expat, openssl, podman, python-kdcproxy, qt5-qt3d, runc, squid, thunderbird, tigervnc, valkey, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (buildah, cloudflared, containerd, expat, firefox, gnutls, helm, kernel, libxslt, mysql-connector-java, ongres-scram, openbao, openexr, openssh, podman, python311, python312, ruby2.5, rubygem-rack, runc, samba, sssd, tiff, unbound, and yelp), and Ubuntu (edk2, ffmpeg, h2o, python3.13, rust-openssl, and valkey).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1047549/

The Racket programming language
project has released Racket
version 9.0. Racket is a descendant of Scheme, so it is part of the Lisp family of languages. The headline feature in the release is parallel
threads, which adds to the concurrency tools in the language: “While
Racket has had green threads for some time, and supports parallelism via
futures and places, we feel parallel threads is a major addition.”
Other new features include the black-box
wrapper to prevent the compiler from optimizing calculations away, the decompile-linklet
function to map linklets
back to an s-expression, the
addition of Weibull
distributions to the math library, and more.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1046216/

Unpacking Python iterables of various sorts, such as dictionaries or lists,
is useful in a number of contexts, including for function arguments, but
there has long been a call for extending that capability to comprehensions. PEP 798 (“Unpacking in
Comprehensions”) was first proposed in June 2025 to fill that gap. In early
November, the steering council accepted
the PEP, which means that the feature will be coming to Python 3.15 in
October 2026. It may be something of a niche feature, but it is an
inconsistency
that has been apparent for a while—to the point that some Python programmers
assume that it is already present in the language.