LWN.net

Seven more stable kernel updates

daroc — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 16:53:10 +0000

-Greg Kroah-Hartman has shared another seven stable kernel updates: -6.6.60, -6.11.7, -6.1.116, -5.15.171, -5.10.229, -5.4.285, and -4.19.323. -

Cohen: gccrs: An alternative compiler for Rust

corbet — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 15:04:37 +0000

Arthur Cohen has posted a -detailed introduction to the gccrs project on the Rust Blog, seemingly -with the goal of convincing the Rust community about the value of the -project. -

- Likewise, many GCC plugins are used for increasing the safety of - critical projects such as the Linux kernel, which has recently - gained support for the Rust programming language. This makes - gccrs a useful tool for analyzing unsafe Rust code, and - more generally Rust code which has to interact with existing C - code. We also want gccrs to be a useful tool for - rustc itself by helping pan out the Rust specification - effort with a unique viewpoint - that of a tool trying to replicate - another's functionality, oftentimes through careful experimentation - and source reading where the existing documentation did not go into - enough detail. -

-(LWN last looked at gccrs in October).

Security updates for Friday

daroc — Fri, 08 Nov 2024 14:17:02 +0000

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (edk2), Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (thunderbird), Oracle (bzip2, container-tools:ol8, edk2, go-toolset:ol8, libtiff, python-idna, python3.11, and python3.12), Slackware (expat), and SUSE (apache2, govulncheck-vulndb, grub2, java-1_8_0-openjdk, python3, python39, qemu, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland). -

Security updates for Thursday

jake — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 16:14:36 +0000

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bcc, bpftrace, bzip2, container-tools:rhel8, grafana-pcp, haproxy, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libtiff, python-gevent, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.12-urllib3, xmlrpc-c, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (puma and pypy3), Fedora (firefox), Gentoo (libgit2), Mageia (libarchive), SUSE (ghostscript, go1.22-openssl, go1.23-openssl, htmldoc, kmail-account-wizard, libarchive, libgsf, libmozjs-128-0, openssl-3, python-jupyterlab, python-mysql-connector-python, python36, and ruby2.1), and Ubuntu (cinder, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.8, linux-aws, linux-azure-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency). -

Funding restored for man-page maintenance

corbet — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 15:48:15 +0000

Man pages maintainer Alejandro Colomar announced in September that he was suspending -his work due to a lack of support. He has now let -it be known that funding has been found for the next year at least: -

- We've been talking for a couple of months, and we have already - agreed to sign a contract through the LF [Linux Foundation], where - a number of companies provide the funds for the contract. The - contract will cover the next 12 months for the agreed amount, and - we should sign it in the following days. Since I've already seen a - draft of the contract, and it looks good, I've already started - maintaining the project again, starting on Nov 1st. -

Security updates for Wednesday

jzb — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 14:13:03 +0000

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libtiff), Debian (context, libheif, and thunderbird), Fedora (php-tcpdf, syncthing, and thunderbird), Gentoo (EditorConfig core C library, Flatpak, Neat VNC, and Ubiquiti UniFi), Oracle (bcc, bpftrace, grafana-pcp, haproxy, kernel, krb5, libtiff, python-gevent, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12-urllib3, and xmlrpc-c), Red Hat (python3.11-urllib3), SUSE (audacity, curl, govulncheck-vulndb, gradle, htmldoc, libgsf, python310, and qbittorrent), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4, mpg123, and python-werkzeug). -

LXQt 2.1.0 released

jzb — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 15:17:48 +0000

Version -2.1.0 of the LXQt -lightweight Qt desktop environment has been released. The highlight of -this release is support for multiple Wayland compositors:

- -

-
Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 -supports 7 Wayland sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, -Sway, River and Niri), has two Wayland back-ends in -lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other -general), and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not -limited to X11 — i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. [...]
- -
Of course, the X11 session will be supported -indefinitely. Wayland is optional and rather experimental.
-

The BPF instruction set architecture is now RFC 9669

corbet — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:43:37 +0000

After a couple of years of effort, the BPF instruction set architecture has -been accepted as RFC -9669, giving it a standard outside of the in-kernel implementation. This message from David -Vernet (who also contributed an article on -the standardization process last year) describes the process and why it -is important: -

- Though some vendors have already implemented BPF offloading - capabilities without having a standardized ISA, others are not - quite as risk tolerant. As Christoph [Hellwig] discussed at LSFMM - 2022, certain NVMe vendors have expressed an interest in building - BPF offloading capabilities for various use cases such as eXpress - Resubmission Path (XRP), but they simply can't fund such a project - without certain components of BPF being standardized. Hence, the - effort to standardize BPF was born. -

Security updates for Tuesday

corbet — Tue, 05 Nov 2024 14:42:28 +0000

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, openexr, and thunderbird), Fedora (llama-cpp and python-quart), Oracle (firefox, openexr, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (chromium, govulncheck-vulndb, openssl-1_1, python311, and python312), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, openjpeg2, and ruby3.0, ruby3.2, ruby3.3). -

LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024

corbet — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 00:42:27 +0000

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024 is available. -

An update on Apple M1/M2 GPU drivers

jake — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 16:23:29 +0000

The kernel graphics driver for the Apple M1 and M2 GPUs is, rather -famously, written in Rust, but it has achieved conformance with -various graphics standards, which is also noteworthy. At the X.Org Developers Conference -(XDC) 2024, Alyssa Rosenzweig gave an update on the status of the -driver, along with some news about the kinds of games it can support (YouTube video, slides). -There has been lots of progress since her talk at XDC last year (YouTube video), -with, of course, still more to come. -

A new approach to validating test suites

daroc — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 17:01:12 +0000

-The first program that Martin Pool ever wrote, he said, had bugs; the ones he's writing -now most likely have bugs too. The talk Pool gave at -RustConf this year was about a way to try -to write programs with fewer bugs. He has developed a tool called - -cargo-mutants that highlights gaps in test coverage by identifying -functions that can be broken without causing any tests to fail. -This can be a valuable complement to other testing techniques, -he explained. -

The performance of the Rust compiler

daroc — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 16:10:27 +0000

-Sparrow Li presented virtually at - -RustConf 2024 about the current state of and -future plans for the Rust compiler's performance. The compiler is relatively slow to compile -large programs, although it has been getting better over time. The next big -performance improvement to come will be parallelizing the compiler's parsing, -type-checking, and related operations, but even after that, the project has -several avenues left to explore. -

AutoFDO and Propeller

jake — Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:15:19 +0000

Rong Xu and -Han Shen described the kernel-optimization techniques that Google uses in the toolchains -track at the 2024 Linux -Plumbers Conference. -They talked about automatic -feedback-directed optimization (AutoFDO), which can be used with the Propeller -optimizer to produce kernels with better performance using profile -information gathered from real workloads. There is a fair amount of -overlap between these tools and the BOLT -post-link optimizer, which was the subject of a talk that directly preceded this session. -

OSI readies controversial Open AI definition

jzb — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:02:36 +0000

The Open Source Initiative -(OSI) has been working on defining Open Source AI—that is what -constitutes an AI system that can be used, studied, modified, and -shared for any purpose—for almost two -years. Its board will -be voting on the Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) on Sunday, -October 27, with the 1.0 version slated to be published on -October 28. It is never possible to please everyone in -such an endeavor, and it would be folly to make that a goal. However, -a number of prominent figures in the open-source community have voiced -concerns that OSI is setting the bar too low with the OSAID—which -will undo decades of community work to cajole vendors into adhering to -or respecting the original Open Source -Definition (OSD).

Kernel optimization with BOLT

jake — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:39:48 +0000

A pair of talks in the toolchains -track at the 2024 Linux -Plumbers Conference covered different tools that can be used to -optimize the kernel. First up was Maksim Panchenko to describe the binary -optimization and layout tool (BOLT) that Meta uses on its production -kernels. It optimizes the kernel binary by rearranging it to improve its -code locality for -better performance. A subsequent article will cover the second talk, which -looked at automatic -feedback-directed optimization (AutoFDO) and other related techniques -that are used to optimize Google's kernels. -

realloc() and the oversize importance of zero-size objects

corbet — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:36:41 +0000

Small objects can lead to large email threads. In this -case, the GNU C Library (glibc) community has been having an extensive -debate over the handling of zero-byte allocations. Specifically, what -should happen when a program calls realloc() -specifying a size of zero? This is, it seems, a topic about which some -people, at least, have strong feelings. -

LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 24, 2024

corbet — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:42:13 +0000

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 24, 2024 is available. -

Toward safe transmutation in Rust

daroc — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 17:40:38 +0000

-Currently in Rust, there is no efficient and safe way to turn an array of bytes -into a structure that corresponds to the array. Changing that was the topic of -Jack Wrenn's talk this year at - -RustConf: - -"Safety Goggles for Alchemists". The goal is to be able to "transmute" — -Rust's name for this kind of conversion — values into arbitrary user-defined -types in a safer way. Wrenn justified the approach that the project has taken to -accomplish this, and spoke about the future work required to stabilize it. -

Free-software foundations face fundraising problems

jzb — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:52:28 +0000

In July, at the GNOME annual general meeting (AGM), -held at GUADEC -2024, -the message from the GNOME Foundation board was that all was well, -financially speaking. Not great, but the foundation was on a -break-even budget and expected to go into its next fiscal year with a -similar budget and headcount. On October 7, however, the board announced -that it had had to make some cuts, including reducing its staff by -two people. This is not, however, strictly a GNOME problem: similar -organizations, such as the Python Software Foundation (PSF), KDE e.V., -and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are seeing declines in -fundraising while also being affected by inflation.