RSS Parrot

[$] Best practices for error handling in kernel Rust

https://lwn.net/Articles/990489/

Published: September 19, 2024 15:54

Dirk Behme led a session discussing the use of Rust's question-mark operator in the kernel at Kangrejos 2024. He was particularly concerned with the concept of "silent" errors that don't print any messages to the console. Other attendees were less…

[$] RPM 4.20 is coming

https://lwn.net/Articles/988927/

Published: September 19, 2024 13:31

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…

Security updates for Thursday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990877/

Published: September 19, 2024 12:36

Security updates have been issued by Debian (expat and tinyproxy), Fedora (frr, microcode_ctl, python3.10, python3.12, python3.6, and ruby), Oracle (expat, fence-agents, firefox, ghostscript, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox,…

[$] The uncertain future of kernel regression tracking

https://lwn.net/Articles/990599/

Published: September 19, 2024 06:23

Tracking of regressions seems like an important task for any project; there is no other way to ensure that known problems are fixed. At the 2024 Maintainers Summit, though, Thorsten Leemhuis, who has been doing that work for the kernel, expressed some…

GNOME 47 released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990788/

Published: September 19, 2024 05:48

Version 47 of the GNOME desktop has been released. Changes include configurable accent colors, better small-screen support, some performance improvements, new file open and save dialogs, and more.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 19, 2024

https://lwn.net/Articles/989982/

Published: September 19, 2024 05:04

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 19, 2024 is available.

Three stable kernel updates for Wednesday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990766/

Published: September 18, 2024 17:39

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.

Swift 6 released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990753/

Published: September 18, 2024 15:36

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…

Haiku R1/beta5 has been released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990735/

Published: September 18, 2024 14:54

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…

[$] Kernel developers at Cauldron

https://lwn.net/Articles/990379/

Published: September 18, 2024 14:00

A Linux system is made up of a large number of interdependent components, all of which must support each other well. It can thus be surprising that, it seems, the developers working on those components do not often speak with each other. In the hope of…

LLVM 16.1.0 released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990706/

Published: September 18, 2024 13:15

Version 16.1.0 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…

Security updates for Wednesday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990731/

Published: September 18, 2024 13:08

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,…

[$] A discussion of Rust safety documentation

https://lwn.net/Articles/990273/

Published: September 17, 2024 18:34

Kangrejos 2024 started off with a talk from Benno Lossin about his recent work to establish a standard for safety documentation in Rust kernel code. Lossin began his talk by giving a brief review of what safety documentation is, and why it's needed, before…

[$] Vanilla OS 2: an immutable distribution to run all software

https://lwn.net/Articles/989629/

Published: September 17, 2024 17:12

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…

Security proof for Linux's random number generator

https://lwn.net/Articles/990596/

Published: September 17, 2024 12:35

Four researchers have published a formal proof that Linux's new deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) is secure in a particular sense — specifically, that the number of queries that would need to be made to it to uncover its internal state depends on…

[$] An update on BPF generation from GCC

https://lwn.net/Articles/990343/

Published: September 17, 2024 12:23

The generation of binary code for the kernel's BPF virtual machine has been limited to the Clang compiler since the beginning; even developers who use GCC to build kernels must use Clang to compile to BPF. Work has been underway for some years on adding a…

Security updates for Tuesday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990588/

Published: September 17, 2024 11:52

Security updates have been issued by Debian (php-twig and pymongo), Fedora (linux-firmware, microcode_ctl, and python3.13), Mageia (clamav, microcode, postgresql13 and postgresql15, python3-webob, suricata, tcpreplay, tgt, and wireshark), Oracle (httpd,…

Linux Foundation announces OpenSearch Software Foundation

https://lwn.net/Articles/990517/

Published: September 16, 2024 21:33

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…

[$] Fedora evicts WolfSSL

https://lwn.net/Articles/989687/

Published: September 16, 2024 16:40

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…

Valkey 8.0.0 released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990490/

Published: September 16, 2024 15:19

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…

[$] Some 6.11 development statistics

https://lwn.net/Articles/989528/

Published: September 16, 2024 14:24

The 6.11 kernel was released on September 15 after a typical nine-week development cycle. This release integrates 13,890 non-merge changesets, so it was a moderately busy cycle, slightly more so that 6.10 was. With a new release comes a new round of…

Security updates for Monday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990455/

Published: September 16, 2024 09:50

Security updates have been issued by Debian (git, nodejs, and ring), Fedora (apr, bubblewrap, chromium, clamav, flatpak, mingw-expat, python3-docs, python3.12, and thunderbird), Mageia (assimp, botan2, python-tqdm, and radare2), Slackware (libarchive), and…

The 6.11 kernel has been released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990307/

Published: September 15, 2024 15:32

Linus has released the 6.11 kernel. "I'm once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it's Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out." Significant changes in this release include new io_uring operations for bind() and listen(), the…

GNOME Foundation opens search for new Executive Director

https://lwn.net/Articles/990270/

Published: September 13, 2024 19:08

The GNOME Foundation has announced that it is looking for a new Executive Director following the departure of Holly Million in July: As the cornerstone of our leadership team, the Executive Director will play a critical role in shaping the strategic…

Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to invest in Samba improvements

https://lwn.net/Articles/990264/

Published: September 13, 2024 17:47

Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) has agreed to invest €688,800 to improve the security, stability, and functionality of Samba. The investment will take place over three years and will be managed by SerNet, a company that employs several Samba core…

[$] The RCU API, 2024 edition

https://lwn.net/Articles/988638/

Published: September 13, 2024 15:50

Read-copy-update (RCU) is a synchronization mechanism that was added to the Linux kernel in October 2002. RCU is most frequently used as a replacement for reader-writer locking, but is also used in a number of other ways. This article covers recent…

Security updates for Friday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990202/

Published: September 13, 2024 13:45

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (haproxy, osc, and python3.11), Oracle (389-ds:1.4), Red Hat (kernel), SUSE (clamav, colord, kernel, postgresql16, and qemu), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke,…

VirtualBox 7.1.0 released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990125/

Published: September 12, 2024 21:42

Version 7.1.0 of the VirtualBox virtualization system has been released. Changes include a major GUI update, a new Network Address Translation (NAT) engine with IPv6 support, shared clipboard support on Wayland, and more.

[$] Debating ifupdown replacements for Debian trixie

https://lwn.net/Articles/989055/

Published: September 12, 2024 15:55

Debian does not have an official way to configure networking. Instead, it has four recommended ways to configure networking, one of which is the venerable ifupdown, which has part of Debian since the turn of the century and is showing its age. A…

New stable kernels released

https://lwn.net/Articles/990043/

Published: September 12, 2024 15:25

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of seven new stable kernels: 6.10.10, 6.6.51, 6.1.110, 5.15.167, 5.10.226 5.4.284, and 4.19.322. As usual, they all contain lots of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates for Thursday

https://lwn.net/Articles/990040/

Published: September 12, 2024 15:08

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and redis), Fedora (nextcloud, python3.10, python3.13, python3.6, vim, and wolfssl), Mageia (expat, libpcap, and microcode), Oracle (dovecot, kernel, and kernel-container), Red Hat (kernel and krb5),…