Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/992496/

Version 7.1 of
the FFmpeg audio/video toolkit has been released. Important changes in
this release include the VVC decoder reaching stable status, and
inclusion of support for MV-HEVC decoding (which is generated by
recent phones and VR headsets), as well as support for Vulkan encoding
with H264 and HEVC. See the announcement and changelog
for full details.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991906/

WordPress is the world’s most
popular open‑source blogging and content‑management platform. In its
20‑plus years of existence, WordPress has been something of a poster
child for open source, similar to Linux and Firefox. It introduced the
concept of open source to millions of bloggers, small‑business owners,
and others who have deployed WordPress to support their web‑publishing
needs. Unfortunately, it is now in the spotlight due to an increasingly
ugly dispute between two companies, Automattic and WP Engine, that has spilled over into
the WordPress community.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991088/

In the wake of the XZ
backdoor, the Debian project has revisited some of the
patches included in its OpenSSH
packages to improve security. The outcome of this is that the project
will be splitting out support for Kerberos key exchange into a
separate set of packages, though not until after the Debian 13
(“trixie”) release expected next year. The impact on Debian users
should be minimal, but it is an interesting look into the changes
Linux distributions make to upstream software as well as some of the
long-term consequences of those choices.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991904/

Version
17 of the PostgreSQL database has been released.

This release of PostgreSQL adds significant overall performance gains,
including an overhauled memory management implementation for vacuum,
optimizations to storage access and improvements for high concurrency
workloads, speedups in bulk loading and exports, and query execution
improvements for indexes. PostgreSQL 17 has features that benefit
brand new workloads and critical systems alike, such as additions to
the developer experience with the SQL/JSON JSON_TABLE command, and
enhancements to logical replication that simplify management of high
availability workloads and major version upgrades.

LWN recently covered
some of the interesting new features and security enhancements in
PostgreSQL 17.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991722/

The Vanilla OS project has
published a
blog post to answer questions that users have raised since the release of Vanilla OS 2. The post has information about the update strategy for the distribution,
an enterprise
version with support, and plans for an experimental version called
Vanilla OS Vision.

We are not planning for a potential Vanilla OS 3 because it is not
yet necessary. As previously explained, our focus right now is on bug
fixing and making the system as solid as possible, especially in light
of collaborations with OEMs. We’re all excited about laying the
foundation for a third version of Vanilla OS, but we have
responsibilities to attend to first.

This does not mean that there will never be one, nor does it mean
that Orchid will become stagnant. On the contrary, as previously
mentioned, our updates not only bring fixes but also updates to system
components, improvements to existing features, and updates to
components like GNOME (we are planning the release of GNOME 47 soon,
for example).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991701/

Security updates have been issued by Debian (booth), Gentoo (Xpdf), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, golang, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, libnbd, openssl, pcp, and ruby:3.3), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, kernel, and kernel-rt), SUSE (apr, cargo-audit, chromium, obs-service-cargo, python311, python36, quagga, traefik, and xen), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, linux-azure-fde-5.15, and puma).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990604/

Almost a decade ago KDE e.V.,
the non-profit organization that supports KDE, started a process for
selecting goals to help the community unite behind a common vision for where the
project should go in the near future. KDE
recently wrapped up its 2022-2024 cycle and announced the goals for 2024-2026 at Akademy on September 7, in Würzburg,
Germany. This time around, KDE will be looking to streamline its
application-development experience, improve support for input devices,
and bring in new contributors.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991529/

Version
10.0.0 of the HarfBuzz
text-shaping engine has been released. Notable changes in this release
include Unicode
16.0.0 support, adding Cairo script as an output format for
hb-view, and a number of bug fixes.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991401/

Version 1.0.0 of Hy, a Lisp dialect that is embedded in Python, has been released
after nearly 12 years in development. This is the first stable release of the project:

Henceforth, breaking changes to documented parts of the language
(other than dropping support for versions of Python that are
themselves no longer supported by the CPython developers) will
increase the major version number, and my intention is for that not to
happen often, if at all.

The 1.0.0 release supports Python 3.8 through 3.13. See the documentation and the “Why Hy?” page for why
one might want to use it.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/991091/

The SUSE Security Team Blog has a detailed review of the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 6.2.1 release:

The rather complex PCP software suite was difficult to judge just from
a cursory look, so we decided to take a closer look especially at
PCP’s networking logic at a later time. This report contains two CVEs
and some non-CVE related findings we also gathered during the
follow-up review.

CVE-2024-45769,
a flaw that could allow an attacker to send crafted data to crash
pcmd, and CVE-2024-45770,
which could allow a full local root exploit from the pcp user to root,
have been addressed in the 6.3.1
release of PCP.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/988927/

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) project is
nearing the release of RPM 4.20, the last major planned update for the RPM 4.x
series. It has few user-facing changes, but
several additions and enhancements for developers—as well as
some small incompatibilities that will likely require RPM packagers to
revise their spec
files. 4.20 will be rolling out to many users soon, in
Fedora 41, which is scheduled for October. RPM 6.0 is
already in the works, with a new package format and opening the door
to enabling C++ use in the RPM codebase.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990766/

The 6.10.11, 6.6.52, and 6.1.111 stable kernel updates have all
been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the
tree. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990753/

Version
6.0 of the Swift programming language has been released. Notable
changes include new low-level programming features,
expanded Linux support, and a preview release of the Embedded
Swift language subset for embedded software development with a
toolchain for Arm and RISC-V targets. See the CHANGELOG
for full details of changes in 6.0.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990735/

Version
R1/beta5 for the Haiku
project, an open-source “spiritual successor to BeOS“, has been released. Notable
changes in this release include a TUN/TAP network driver, basic
support for USB audio devices, TCP throughput improvements, a
rewritten driver for the FAT filesystem, read-only support for
Unix File System 2 (UFS2), as well as hundreds of bug fixes and
performance improvements since the last release in
December 2022. Thanks to Paul Wise for the tip.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990706/

Version
19.1.0 of the LLVM compiler suite has been released:

This is the first release in the LLVM 19.x series and represents 6
months of work the LLVM community. During this period 1502 unique
authors contributed 18925 commits (3605729 lines added and 1665792
lines removed) to LLVM.

As usual, there is a long list of changes; see the release notes
for LLVM,
Libc++,
lld,
Clang,
and Extra
Clang Tools for changes to each.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990731/

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (pcs), Debian (expat, galera-4, libreoffice, mariadb-10.5, and php-twig), Fedora (chromium), Red Hat (ghostscript and git), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-bad, libvpl, python-dnspython, python3, and python36), and Ubuntu (expat, frr, libxmltok, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, openssl, and quagga).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989629/

Vanilla OS, an immutable desktop
Linux distribution designed for developers and advanced users, has
recently published its 2.0
“Orchid” release. Previously based on Ubuntu, Vanilla OS has now
shifted to Debian unstable (“sid”). The release has made it easier to
install software from other distributions’ package repositories, and it
is now theoretically possible to install and run Android applications as well.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990517/

The Linux Foundation has announced
the creation of the OpenSearch Software
Foundation as a vendor‑neutral home for the OpenSearch search and observability
software:

Established in 2021 and previously hosted by Amazon Web Services
(AWS), OpenSearch has recorded more than 700 million software
downloads and participation from thousands of contributors and more
than 200 project maintainers.

AWS created
the OpenSearch project as an open-source fork of ElasticSearch and
Kibana in 2021 after Elastic moved those projects to
non-free licenses. Elastic announced in August that it would
relicense the projects under the Affero GPL (AGPL).

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/989687/

The Fedora
Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) has voted to
immediately remove the WolfSSL package from all of Fedora’s
repositories due to its maintainer failing to gain approval to package
a new cryptography library for Fedora. Its brief travels through
Fedora’s package system highlights gaps in documentation, as well as
in the package‑review process. The good news is that this may stir
Fedora to improve its documentation and revive a formal security
team.

Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/990490/

Version 8.0.0 of
the Valkey open-source in-memory data
store is now available. This is the first major release of Valkey
since the project forked from Redis in March of this year:

While this is a major version, Valkey takes command set compatibility
seriously: Valkey 8.0.0 makes no backwards incompatible changes to the
existing command syntax or their responses. Your existing tools and
custom software will be able to immediately take advantage of Valkey
8.0.0. Since Valkey 8.0.0 does make some small changes to previously
undefined behaviors, it’s wise to read
the release notes. Additionally, because this version makes changes in how the
software uses threading, you may want to re-evaluate your cluster’s
infrastructure to achieve the highest performance.