Amir Goldstein led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on his project to build a hierarchical storage management (HSM) system using fanotify. The idea is to monitor file access in order to determine when to retrieve content from non-local storage (e.g. the cloud). The session was a follow-up to last year's introduction to the project, which covered some of the problems he had encountered; this year, he was updating attendees on its status and progress, along with some other problem areas that he wanted to discuss.

Maintenance of the kernel is a difficult, often thankless, task; how it is being handled, the role of maintainers, burnout, and so on are recurring topics at kernel-related conferences. At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Josef Bacik and Christian Brauner led a session to discuss possible changes to the way filesystems are maintained, though Bacik took the lead role (and the podium). There are a number of interrelated topics, including merging new filesystems, removing old ones, making and testing changes throughout the filesystem tree, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (freeradius), Red Hat (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, and java-17-openjdk), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (ghostscript, gnutls, podman, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (linux-hwe-6.5, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and stunnel).

Leah Rumancik led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on the testing needed to qualify XFS patches for the stable kernels. At last year's summit, Rumancik, Amir Goldstein, and Chandan Babu Rajendra presented on their efforts to test and backport fixes for the XFS filesystem to three separate stable kernels. There has been some longstanding unhappiness in the XFS-development community with the stable-kernel process, which led to backports ceasing for that filesystem until Goldstein started working on XFS testing for the stable trees a few years ago. In this year's session, Rumancik updated attendees on how things had gone over the last year and wanted to discuss some remaining pain points for the process.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released seven new stable kernels: 6.9.10, 6.6.41, 6.1.100, 5.15.163, 5.10.222, 5.4.280, and 4.19.318. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that it will be changing its logo to remove the feather that has been part of its brand since 1997. ASF members will have input on the rebranding process and be able to vote on the new logo, which will be unveiled at the Community Over Code conference in October.

The feather is a well-loved and iconic part of the ASF brand. We know of community members who have ASF feather tattoos. People love taking photos with the feather at our flagship event each year.

So why would we change it? As a non-Indigenous entity, we acknowledge that it is inappropriate for the Foundation to use Indigenous themes or language. We thank Natives in Tech and other members of the broader open source community for bringing this issue to the forefront. Today we are announcing we will be retiring the feather icon and logo and replacing it with a new logo that embodies the Foundation's rich history of providing software for the public good.

The sad news that Peter de Schrijver has passed away has just reached us. An obituary in Dutch relates that he passed in a Helsinki hospital on July 12. Mind Software Consulting, which he founded, has a message of condolences as well. De Schrijver was a Debian Developer and a Linux kernel contributor; he will be missed.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (botan2, chromium, ffmpeg, fluent-bit, gtk3, httpd, suricata, tcpreplay, and thunderbird), Mageia (apache, chromium-browser-stable, libfm & libfm-qt, and thunderbird), Oracle (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libndp, qt5-qtbase, ruby, skopeo, thunderbird, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, firefox, libndp, qt5-qtbase, and thunderbird), SUSE (caddy, chromium, emacs, global, mockito, snakeyaml, testng, and opera), and Ubuntu (thunderbird).

Simon Willison, co-creator of the popular Django web framework for Python, gave a keynote presentation at PyCon 2024 on a topic that is unrelated to that work: large language models (LLMs). The topic grew out of some other work that he is doing on Datasette, which is a Python-based "tool for exploring and publishing data". The talk was a look beyond the hype to try to discover what useful things you can actually do today using these models. Unsurprisingly, there were some cautionary notes from Willison, as well.

David Howells wanted to discuss swap handling in light of multi-page folios in a combined storage, filesystem, and memory-management session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Swapping has always been done with a one-to-one mapping of memory pages to swap slots, he said, but swapping multi-page folios breaks that assumption. He wondered if it would make sense to use filesystem techniques to track swapped-out folios.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Fedora (exim, python-zipp, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, and xmedcon), Red Hat (cups, fence-agents, freeradius, freeradius:3.0, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, podman, and resource-agents), Slackware (htdig and libxml2), SUSE (exim), and Ubuntu (ocsinventory-server, php-cas, and poppler).

The 6.9.11, 6.6.42, and 6.1.101 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree.

At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John Groves led a session on famfs, which is a filesystem he has developed that uses the kernel's direct-access (DAX) mechanism to access memory that is shareable between hosts. The discussion was aimed at whether a different approach should be taken and, in particular, whether FUSE should be used instead of implementing as an in-kernel filesystem. As noted in the thread about his proposal for an LSFMM+BPF session, and the mailing-list discussions on the first and second version of his patch set, there is some skepticism that a new in-kernel filesystem is warranted for the use case.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-11), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, ffmpeg, hostapd, trafficserver, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (curl and linux-oem-6.5).

David Howells wanted to discuss changing the way filesystem code handles the ability to interrupt or kill operations, in order to fix some longstanding problems with network (and other) filesystems, in a session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. As noted in his session proposal, some filesystems may be expecting to not be interruptible, but are calling code can take locks and mutexes that are interruptible (or killable), which are effectively changing the state of the task incorrectly. He would like to find a solution for that problem.

CircuitPython is an open-source implementation of the Python programming language for microcontroller boards. The project, which is sponsored by Adafruit Industries, is designed with new programmers in mind, but it also has many features that may be of interest to more-experienced developers. The recent 9.1.0 release adds a few minor features, but it follows just a few months after CircuitPython 9.0.0, which brings some more significant changes, including improved graphics and USB support.

There are lots of places in the kernel where an EINVAL can be returned to user space, but it is often unclear what the actual underlying problem is because the errno error codes are too generic. That is the problem that Miklos Szeredi wanted to discuss in a filesystem session that he led remotely at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. He would like to help those who are trying to debug problems trace where in the kernel a particular error code is being generated.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freeradius and freeradius:3.0), Debian (chromium, odoo, and roundcube), Fedora (microcode_ctl, mingw-qt5-qtbase, mingw-qt6-qtbase, opentofu, orc, python-setuptools, and vim), Gentoo (Nokogiri), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, kernel, krb5, libtiff, python-setuptools, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), SUSE (python-Django), and Ubuntu (krb5).

It is something of a DebConf tradition that members of the Debian Technical Committee (TC) take the stage to talk about the work that the committee does—and more. DebConf24 in Busan, South Korea was no exception, as TC chair Sean Whitton, who will complete his term at the end of the year, and one of its newest members, Stefano Rivera, described the constitutional underpinnings of the TC, how it tries to make decisions when it needs to, and the constant process of recruiting new members. After that, they took a few questions from the audience. The session provided a nice overview of the TC and its role in Debian, but it may well be of interest further afield.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (httpd:2.4), Fedora (chromium, firefox, frr, neatvnc, nss, python-setuptools, and python3.13), Gentoo (AFLplusplus, Bundler, dpkg, GnuPG, GPAC, libde265, matio, MuPDF, PHP, protobuf, protobuf-python, protobuf-c, rsyslog, Ruby on Rails, and runc), Red Hat (389-ds-base, container-tools:rhel8, and httpd:2.4), SUSE (bind and ca-certificates-mozilla), and Ubuntu (linux-azure).