Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1024158/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and mariadb-10.5), Oracle (firefox, ghostscript, git, go-toolset:ol8, golang, kernel, krb5, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, perl-CPAN, python36:3.6, rsync, varnish, and varnish:6), Red Hat (firefox, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (curl and python3), SUSE (apache-commons-beanutils, apache2-mod_security2, avahi, buildkit, ca-certificates-mozilla, cloud-regionsrv-client, cloud-regionsrv-client, python-toml, containerd, containerized-data-importer, cups, curl, dnsmasq, docker, elemental-operator, elemental-toolkit, expat, firefox, freetype2, gdk-pixbuf, git, glib2, glibc, gnuplot, gnutls, gpg2, gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-base, gtk3, haproxy, helm, java-17-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, keepalived, kernel, kernel-firmware, krb5, kubevirt, less, libarchive, libcryptopp, libdb-4_8, libndp, libpcap, libsoup, libtasn1, libvirt, libX11, libxml2, libxslt, Mesa, mozilla-nss, nghttp2, nvidia-open-driver-G06-signed, opensc, openssh, openssl-3, openssl-3, libpulp, ulp-macros, orc, pam, pam_pkcs11, pam_u2f, patch, pcp, pcr-oracle, shim, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA, podman, postgresql16, procps, protobuf, python-dnspython, python-Jinja2, python-requests, python-setuptools, python-tornado6, python-urllib3, python311, python311, python-rpm-macros, qemu, rsync, runc, rust-keylime, selinux-policy, sevctl, skopeo, sssd, SUSE Manager Client Tools, systemd, thunderbird, tiff, tpm2.0-tools, tpm2-0-tss, u-boot, ucode-intel, unbound, util-linux, vim, wget, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (linux-nvidia, python-django, twitter-bootstrap3, twitter-bootstrap4, and wireshark).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022718/

Peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) has been part of
the kernel since the 4.20 release in 2018;
it provides a framework that allows devices to transfer data between themselves
directly, without using system RAM for the transfer. At the 2025 Linux
Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Stephen
Bates led a combined storage, filesystems, and memory-management session on
device-initiated I/O, which is perhaps what P2PDMA is evolving toward. Two
years ago, he led a session on P2PDMA at the
summit; this year’s session was a brief update on P2PDMA with a look
at where it may be heading.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023299/

Free software plays a critical role in science, both in research and in
disseminating it. Aspects of software freedom are directly relevant to
simulation, analysis, document preparation and preservation, security,
reproducibility, and usability. Free software brings practical and specific
advantages, beyond just its ideological roots, to science, while
proprietary software comes with equally specific risks. As a practicing
scientist, I would like to help others—scientists or not—see the benefits
from free software in science.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023501/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (espeak-ng, kitty, kmail-account-wizard, krb5, libreoffice, libvpx, net-tools, python-flask-cors, symfony, tcpdf, thunderbird, and twitter-bootstrap3), Fedora (chromium, dropbear, firefox, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, python-tornado, systemd, and thunderbird), Mageia (coreutils, deluge, glib2.0, and redis), Oracle (firefox, kernel, and systemd), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, varnish, varnish:6, and zlib), SUSE (bind, curl, dnsdist, docker, ffmpeg-7, firefox, glibc, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, govulncheck-vulndb, icinga2, iputils, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-ibm, kea, kernel, libopenssl-3-devel, libsoup, libxml2, nodejs-electron, open-vm-tools, openbao, perl-Net-Dropbox-API, pluto, poppler, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, python312-setuptools, runc, s390-tools, skopeo, sqlite3, thunderbird, and unbound), and Ubuntu (apport and libphp-adodb).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023076/

The 6.14.9 and 6.12.31 stable kernels have been released.
Each contains an unusually large number of important fixes all over the
kernel tree.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1023072/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel and kernel-rt), Debian (firefox-esr, libvpx, net-tools, php-twig, python-tornado, setuptools, varnish, webpy, yelp, and yelp-xsl), Fedora (xen), Mageia (cimg and ghostscript), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, kernel, libsoup, thunderbird, and unbound), Red Hat (firefox, mingw-freetype and spice-client-win, pcs, and varnish:6), Slackware (curl and mozilla), SUSE (apparmor, containerd, dnsdist, go1.23-openssl, go1.24, gstreamer-plugins-bad, ImageMagick, jetty-minimal, python-tornado, python313-setuptools, s390-tools, thunderbird, tomcat10, ucode-intel, and wxWidgets-3_2), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg, krb5, libsoup3, libsoup2.4, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-fips, linux-fips, linux-oracle-6.8, net-tools, and python-setuptools, setuptools).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021871/

Cory Doctorow wears many hats:
digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has
also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting
professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic
Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism
co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote
in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on
the state of the “enshitternet”—today’s internet—to kick
off the recently held PyCon US
2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022639/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, ghostscript, grafana, kernel, and osbuild-composer), Debian (intel-microcode, kernel, libphp-adodb, and openssl), Fedora (dotnet8.0, ghostscript, iputils, nbdkit, open-vm-tools, thunderbird, and vyper), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, glibc, iputils, microcode, nodejs, and zsync), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, avahi, buildah, compat-openssl11, expat, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, git, grafana, gvisor-tap-vsock, libsoup, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, nodejs:20, osbuild-composer, podman, skopeo, thunderbird, vim, webkit2gtk3, xdg-utils, xterm, and yelp), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, libsoup, libsoup3, python-tornado, and ruby), Slackware (ffmpeg), SUSE (audiofile, firefox, glibc, govulncheck-vulndb, grafana, kernel, kind, kubo, libecpg6, postgresql13, postgresql14, python-Django, python-setuptools, python-tornado6, python311-Flask, python311-tornado6, python313, python36-setuptools, thunderbird, transfig, and xen), and Ubuntu (glib2.0, linux-bluefield, linux-ibm, linux-raspi, and openjdk-21-crac).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020966/

Testing filesystems is a frequent topic at
the Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF); the 2025 edition was no
exception. Boris Burkov led a filesystem-track session to discuss
stress-testing filesystems—and running those tests for lengthy periods. He
reviewed what he has been doing when testing filesystems and wanted to
gather ideas for what could be done to catch more bugs before the
filesystems hit production.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022222/

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.14.8, 6.12.30, 6.6.92, 6.1.140, and 5.15.184 stable kernels. As usual, each
contains a long list of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1022189/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and webkit2gtk3), Fedora (mozilla-ublock-origin and sudo-rs), Oracle (.NET 8.0, compat-openssl10, grafana, osbuild-composer, redis:6, ruby:2.5, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (dante, firefox-esr, gnuplot, govulncheck-vulndb, grype, postgresql13, postgresql14, postgresql15, postgresql16, postgresql17, python-tornado6, python314, thunderbird, ucode-intel, and xen), and Ubuntu (bind9, libfcgi-perl, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4, postgresql-17, and Tomcat).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020576/

In late March, version 78.0.1 of Setuptools — an important
Python packaging tool — was released. It was scarcely half an hour before
the first bug
report came in, and it quickly became clear that the change was far
more disruptive than anticipated. Within only about five hours 78.0.2 was
published to roll back the change, and multiple discussions were
started about how to limit the damage caused by future breaking
changes. Nevertheless, many users still felt the response was
inadequate. Some previous Setuptools releases have also caused problems on a smaller but still notable scale, and hopefully the developers will be more cautious going forward. But there are also lessons here for the developers of Python package installers, ordinary Python developers and end users, and even Linux distribution maintainers.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020437/

Leon Romanovsky began his session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) by explaining that the improved DMA-mapping API that he has been
working on is a group effort. He, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Christoph Hellwig,
Jason Gunthorpe, and others are proposing to modernize the API and to
“make it more suitable for current kernels“. He told the assembled
storage and filesystem developers that the progress on the proposal has
stalled, but that it was the basis for further work in various areas, so he
hoped to find a way to move forward with it.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1021379/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (open-vm-tools), Fedora (dnsdist), Gentoo (Node.js and Tracker miners), Red Hat (kernel and xdg-utils), SUSE (audiofile, go1.22-openssl, go1.24, grub2, kernel-devel, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, and python311-Django), and Ubuntu (ruby-rack).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020884/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libbson-xs-perl, postgresql-13, redis, and simplesamlphp), Fedora (chromium, deluge, epiphany, golang-github-nats-io-nkeys, libxmp, nodejs22, perl-Compress-Raw-Lzma, php-adodb, python-h11, and xz), Gentoo (firefox, NVIDIA Drivers, Orc, PAM, and thunderbird), Mageia (libreoffice, python-django, and transfig), Red Hat (emacs, firefox, python39:3.9, and thunderbird), SUSE (bird3, freetype2, ldap-proxy, libmosquitto1, and ruby3.4-rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-aws, and linux-fips).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020170/

The famfs
filesystem is meant to provide a shared-memory filesystem for large data
sets that are accessed for computations by multiple systems. It was
developed by John Groves, who led a combined filesystem and
memory-management session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) to discuss it. The session was a
follow-up to the famfs session at last year’s
summit, but it was also meant to discuss whether the kernel’s direct-access (DAX)
mechanism, which is used by famfs, could be replaced in the filesystem
by using other kernel features.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020545/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, libapache2-mod-auth-openidc, mariadb-10.5, and openssh), Red Hat (osbuild-composer), Slackware (mariadb), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, glib2, ImageMagick, libsoup, libsoup2, libva, openvpn, sqlite3, and weblate), and Ubuntu (libsoup3, php-horde-css-parser, and python-django).

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1019522/

In a combined filesystem and memory-management session at
the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory
Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Joanne Koong led a discussion on
improving the writeback performance for the Filesystem in
Userspace (FUSE) layer. Writeback is how data that is written to the
filesystem is actually flushed to the disk; it is the process of writing
dirty pages from the page cache to storage. The current FUSE
implementation allocates unmovable memory, then copies the dirty data to it
before initiating writeback, which is slow; Koong wanted to change that
behavior. Since the session, she has posted a
patch set that has been applied
by FUSE maintainer Miklos Szeredi.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020131/

The 6.12.27 and 6.1.137 stable kernels have been released to
fix build problems in their predecessors. Only those who are having
build troubles with 6.12.26 or 6.1.136 need to upgrade.

Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/1020130/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ansible, containerd, and vips), Fedora (chromium, java-17-openjdk, nodejs-bash-language-server, nodejs-pnpm, ntpd-rs, redis, rust-hickory-proto, thunderbird, and valkey), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, fcgi, graphicsmagick, kernel-linus, pam, poppler, and tomcat), Red Hat (firefox, libsoup, nodejs:20, redis:6, rsync, webkit2gtk3, xmlrpc-c, and yelp), and SUSE (audiofile, ffmpeg, firefox, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libva, libxml2, and thunderbird).