Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1010853/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gcc-toolset-14-gcc, nodejs:18, and nodejs:22), Fedora (bootc), Gentoo (OpenSSH), Oracle (doxygen, libxml2, mingw-glib2, and NetworkManager), Red Hat (bind, bind9.16, bind9.18, kernel, kernel-rt, mysql, and mysql:8.0), Slackware (openssh), SUSE (buildah, emacs, glibc, google-osconfig-agent, grub2, java-11-openj9, kernel, netty, netty-tcnative, openssh, openvswitch, podman, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (atril, libsndfile, libtasn1-6, openssh, python-virtualenv, and symfony).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1010682/

Pi-hole v6 has been released. The
latest version of the popular ad-blocking software sports a redesigned
user interface, has support for subscribing to allowlists, and brings
a new REST API and embedded web server. Its Docker/OCI image is now
based on Alpine Linux
rather than Debian to reduce image
size. See the announcement for guidance on upgrading existing Pi-hole
installations.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008721/

It is a standard practice to use milestones to reflect on the
achievements of a project, such as the anniversary of its first
release or first commit. Usually, these are observed at five and
ten‑year increments; the tenth anniversary of the 1.0 release, or 25
years since from the first public announcement, etc. Lennart
Poettering, however, took a different approach at FOSDEM 2025 with a keynote
commemorating 14 years of systemd,
and a brief look ahead at his goals and systemd’s challenges for the future.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007303/

Memcached is a memory-based
data-caching daemon that has a long history. More than twenty years after its first public
release, Memcached strives to remain relevant in a vastly changed
computing landscape, balancing new features with a commitment to the original
principles that separate it from newer alternatives like Redis and Hazelcast.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007907/

Most Linux systems depend on a suite of core utilities that the GNU Project started development on
decades ago and are, of course, written in C. At FOSDEM 2025, Sylvestre Ledru
made the case in his
main stage talk that modern systems require safer, more
maintainable tools. Over the past few years, Ledru has led the charge
of rewriting the GNU
Core Utilities (coreutils) in Rust, as the MIT-licensed uutils project. The goal is to
offer what he said are more secure, and more performant drop-in
replacements for the tools Linux users depend on. At FOSDEM, Ledru
announced that the uutils project is setting its sights even
higher.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008866/

Version
1.4.0 of Arti, the Tor Project’s next-generation
Tor client written in Rust, has been released. Notable improvements in
this release include a new RPC
interface, and preparatory work toward service-side onion service
denial-of-service resistance. The release is dedicated to the memory of Jérémy Bobbio,
better known by many as “Lunar”. For full details on the release, see
the changelog.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008386/

Jonathan Bryce has announced two open community meetings to hear
input on the topic of the OpenInfra
Foundation migrating to the Linux Foundation. Bryce
wrote that the OpenInfra board has carefully evaluated its options,
and sees joining the Linux Foundation as the best way forward.

Like the Linux Foundation, the OpenInfra Foundation is 501(c)(6)
nonprofit. According to the FAQ,
OpenInfra “is in great health, financially and otherwise” with
a growth in membership of about 15% in the last year. However, its
needs in 2025 are different than when it was founded as the OpenStack
Foundation in 2012.

While the opportunities ahead for open source to make a positive
impact on the world are greater than they have ever been, the
challenges are more significant as well, particularly with respect to
regulations, licensing and geopolitical tensions that threaten global
collaboration.

The meetings will be held on February 11 and February 13 as
Zoom calls. The OpenInfra board will schedule a vote after feedback
has been collected and draft governance documents have been
published.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007426/

Open source is often described as a “gift economy”—an
ecosystem where contributors are motivated by a desire to make the
world a better place. That is, sometimes, true. However, James
Bottomley used his main
track slot at FOSDEM 2025,
on February 1, to make the case that it is better to bank on the
selfish motivations of individuals to drive community success than to
rely on their altruism.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008137/

The Servo Rust-based rendering
engine project has published
an article summarizing its progress in 2024, and plans for the
future:

Servo main dependencies (SpiderMonkey, Stylo and WebRender) have been
upgraded, the new layout engine has kept evolving adding support for
floats, tables, flexbox, fonts, etc. By the end of 2024 Servo passes 1,515,229 WPT subtests (79%). Many other new features have been under
active development: WebGPU, Shadow DOM, ReadableStream, WebXR, … Servo
now supports two new platforms: Android and OpenHarmony. And we have
got the first experiments of applications using Servo as a web engine
(like Tauri,
Blitz, QtWebView,
Cuervo,
Verso and Moto).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006001/

Over the past year or so, LWN has added a number of useful new
features for our subscribers to enhance the experience of reading and
commenting on our content. Those features are of little use, however,
to readers who do not know about them. It has been more than a decade
since we last provided a
tour of the site—it seems that another is in
order. Walk this way for a look at the LWN kernel source database (KSDB),
enhanced commenting features, EPUB downloads, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1008051/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libreoffice), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (google-osconfig-agent, grafana, helm, and rime-schema-all), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-lowlatency, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-23, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1007677/

Matthias Clasen has written a short update on a GTK hackfest that
took place at FOSDSEM and what’s
coming in GTK 4.18. This includes fixes for pointer sizes in Wayland
when fractional scaling is enabled, removal of the old GL renderer in
favor of the GL
renderer introduced in GTK
4.13.6, and deprecation of X11 and Broadway backends with intent
to remove them in GTK 5.

The deprecated backends will remain available until then, and no
action is required by developers at this time, Clasen wrote: “There
is no need to act on deprecations until you are actively porting your
app to the next major version of GTK, which is not on the horizon
yet“.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006916/

The election to replace outgoing openSUSE board members is
underway, with four candidates vying for three seats. The election was
initially scheduled to be completed in December, but the timeline was extended
due to too few candidates standing for the seats. Voting closes on
February 2 and the results are expected to be announced on
February 3.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006917/

The Thunderbird project has announced
that it is making its Release
channel the default download beginning with the 135.0 release in
March. This will move users to major monthly releases instead of the
annual major Extended Support Release (ESR) that is the current
default.

One of our goals for 2025 is to increase active installations on the
release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last
check, we had 29,543 active installations on the release channel,
compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel
installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total
active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006769/

Version 6.9 of the Incus container and virtual-machine management system has been released. Changes include a command to provide virtual machine memory dumps, ability to set network ACLs for instances on bridged networks, and more.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006622/

Ubuntu will be moving its “official realtime communications
channels” from IRC to Matrix, beginning March 1, 2025, following
a discussion
on the ubuntu-devel mailing list.

“Official” communication, such as making realtime requests of privileged
Ubuntu developer teams, could be expected to be actioned if requested on
Matrix only. Similarly, you can consider your social responsibility to
other developers in relation to your work in Ubuntu development to be
fulfilled if you are present on that platform. And Canonical will
follow in its requirement for its employed Ubuntu developers to be
present on that agreed platform during their working hours.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006677/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bzip2, gimp:2.8, keepalived, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, python-jinja2, and redis), Debian (iperf3, libtar, and pdns-recursor), Fedora (abseil-cpp, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, golang, libsoup3, and vaultwarden), Oracle (gimp:2.8, iperf3, keepalived, kernel, redis:7, and unbound), Red Hat (libsoup), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, go1.22, go1.23, iperf, java-21-openjdk, nginx, openvpn, and python311-asteval), and Ubuntu (kernel, libmicrodns, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe,
linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, 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-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15,
linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-gkeop,
linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia,
linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8,
linux-raspi, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.11, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-ibm,
linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-oem-6.8, rsync, and tcpreplay).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1006351/

This year’s edition of the Free and Open
Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) begins on
February 1 in Brussels. The event is widely regarded as one of
the most important open-source conferences. One of the reasons that
FOSDEM is held in high esteem by the community is its non-commercial
nature. It does accept sponsors, but
sponsorships come with few perks and no “pay-for-play” speaking
slots. Thus, the scheduling of a keynote by Jack
Dorsey⁠—⁠primarily known for his role in co-founding Twitter, and
currently CEO and chairman of FOSDEM sponsor Block, Inc.⁠—⁠raised eyebrows and led to plans for a protest. The
keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still
a number of lingering questions.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005655/

The Go language is designed to make it
easy for developers to import other
Go packages and compile everything into a static binary
for simple distribution. Unfortunately, this complicates things for
those who package Go programs for Linux distributions, such as Fedora,
that have guidelines which require dependencies to be packaged
separately. Fedora’s Go special interest
group (SIG) is asking for relief and a loosening of the bundling
guidelines to allow Go packagers to bundle dependencies into the
packages that need them, otherwise known as vendoring. So far, the
participants in the discussion have seemed largely in favor of the
idea.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1005838/

The FreeBSD Foundation
has announced that it has undertaken a project to deliver zero-trust
builds commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA).

The Zero-Trust Build project is scheduled from Jan-Aug 2025 and
centers on the FreeBSD build process, and in particular, release
building. The primary goal of this work is to enable the entire
release process to run without requiring root access, and that build
artifacts build reproducibly – that is, that a third party can build
bit-for-bit identical artifacts.

Additionally, the project aims to enhance build process
documentation, ensuring that release building is straightforward and
does not require specialized knowledge. The work is targeted for
completion prior to the release of FreeBSD 15.0.

The Foundation says that updates should not impact users of FreeBSD
release images, but it may have an impact on developers basing
projects or products on FreeBSD that make modifications to its release
process.