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Aujourd’hui — 31 octobre 2024Actualités libres

[$] The Overture open-mapping project

Par : corbet
31 octobre 2024 à 16:48
OpenStreetMap tends to dominate the space for open mapping data, but it is not the only project working in this area. At the 2024 Open Source Summit Japan, Marc Prioleau presented the Overture Maps Foundation, which is building and distributing a set of worldwide maps under open licenses. Overture may have a similar goal to OpenStreetMap, but its approach and intended uses are significantly different.
À partir d’avant-hierActualités libres

Flock: a Flutter fork

Par : corbet
29 octobre 2024 à 03:52
A project called Flock has announced its existence. Flock is a fork of the Flutter user-interface toolkit project, motivated by frustration with the resources that Google is putting into Flutter.

We describe Flock as "Flutter+". In other words, we do not want, or intend, to fork the Flutter community. Flock will remain constantly up to date with Flutter. Flock will add important bug fixes, and popular community features, which the Flutter team either can't, or won't implement.

(LWN looked at Flutter in 2020).

Kernel prepatch 6.12-rc5

Par : corbet
28 octobre 2024 à 00:01
Linus has released 6.12-rc5 for testing.

rc5 looks perfectly normal, and maybe even on the small side of normal. The diffstat looks nice and flat too, with the exception of the removal of the da8xx fbdev driver due to it having been replaced by the tilcdc driver. And I'm sure we're all thinking the same thing: "What lovely descriptive driver names we have".

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

Par : corbet
24 octobre 2024 à 15:36
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.

Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status

Par : corbet
22 octobre 2024 à 22:12
Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel's MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the patches@lists.linux.dev mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention.

The explanation for the removal is simply "various compliance requirements". Given that the developers involved all appear to be of Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries.

Update: Linus Torvalds has since publicly supported this action and said that it will not be reverted.

Update 2: James Bottomley has clarified the requirements:

If your company is on the U.S. OFAC SDN lists, subject to an OFAC sanctions program, or owned/controlled by a company on the list, our ability to collaborate with you will be subject to restrictions, and you cannot be in the MAINTAINERS file.

Security updates for Tuesday

Par : corbet
22 octobre 2024 à 13:36
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, ghostscript, libsepol, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, perl, and python-sql), Oracle (389-ds-base, buildah, containernetworking-plugins, edk2, httpd, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, python-setuptools, skopeo, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (buildah), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (apache2, firefox, libopenssl-3-devel, podman, and python310-starlette), and Ubuntu (cups-browsed, firefox, libgsf, and linux-gke).

A new kernel testing tree

Par : corbet
21 octobre 2024 à 18:20
Sasha Levin has announced a new tree that is intended to perform continuous-integration tests of pull requests aimed at the mainline. The plan is for this tree to hold more finished work than sometimes ends up in linux-next; in a name that seems destined to create typographical confusion, it is called "linus-next".

The linus-next tree aims to provide a more stable and testable integration point compared to linux-next, addressing the runtime issues that make testing linux-next challenging and focusing on code that's about to be pulled by Linus.

[$] The long road to lazy preemption

Par : corbet
18 octobre 2024 à 14:25
The kernel's CPU scheduler currently offers several preemption modes that implement a range of tradeoffs between system throughput and response time. Back in September 2023, a discussion on scheduling led to the concept of "lazy preemption", which could simplify scheduling in the kernel while providing better results. Things went quiet for a while, but lazy preemption has returned in the form of this patch series from Peter Zijlstra. While the concept appears to work well, there is still a fair amount of work to be done.

Rust 1.82.0 released

Par : corbet
17 octobre 2024 à 18:42
Version 1.82.0 of the Rust language has been released. There are a lot of new features this time, including a cargo info command, tier-1 support for 64-bit Apple Arm systems, a new native syntax (&raw) to create raw pointers, changes to unsafe extern, unsafe attributes, standardized rules around the handling of floating-point not-a-number values, and more.

[$] Two pidfd tweaks: PIDFD_GET_INFO and PIDFD_SELF

Par : corbet
16 octobre 2024 à 13:52
The pidfd mechanism, which uses file descriptors to refer to processes in an unambiguous and race-free way, was first introduced in 2018. Since then, the interface has gained a number of new features, but development has slowed over time as the interface has matured. There are, however, a couple of patches in circulation that are meant to make working with pidfds simpler in some situations.

Security updates for Tuesday

Par : corbet
15 octobre 2024 à 13:43
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, firefox, OpenIPMI, podman, and thunderbird), Debian (libapache-mod-jk, php7.4, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (edk2, koji, libgsf, rust-hyper-rustls, rust-reqwest, rust-rustls-native-certs, rust-rustls-native-certs0.7, rust-tonic, rust-tonic-build, rust-tonic-types, rust-tower, rust-tower-http, rust-tower-http0.5, and rust-tower0.4), Mageia (firefox, firefox-l10n, and thunderbird), Oracle (bind, container-tools:ol8, kernel, kernel-container, OpenIPMI, podman, and thunderbird), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, containernetworking-plugins, podman, and skopeo), SUSE (argocd-cli, bsdtar, keepalived, kernel, kyverno, libmozjs-115-0, libmozjs-128-0, libmozjs-78-0, OpenIPMI, opensc, php8, thunderbird, and xen), and Ubuntu (configobj, haproxy, imagemagick, nginx, and postgresql-10, postgresql-9.3).

Kernel prepatch 6.12-rc3

Par : corbet
13 octobre 2024 à 22:45
The 6.12-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

So the diffstat looks a bit odd, because one of the fixes here caused the UTF tables to be regenerated, and an effective one-liner change turned into 6703 lines of diff.

But if you ignore that effect, everything looks normal.

[$] On Rust in enterprise kernels

Par : corbet
10 octobre 2024 à 13:11
At the recently concluded Maintainers Summit, it was generally agreed that the Rust experiment would continue, and that the path was clear for more Rust code to enter the kernel. But the high-level view taken at such gatherings cannot always account for the difficult details that will inevitably arise as the Rust work proceeds. A recent discussion on the nouveau mailing list may have escaped the notice of many, but it highlights some of the problems that will have to be worked out as important functionality written in Rust heads toward the mainline.
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