The openSUSE Leap 15.6 release is available; this is intended to be the last Leap 15.x release before Leap 16 comes out. "Leap 15.6 is projected to receive maintenance and security updates until the end of 2025 to ensure sufficient overlap with the next release". Changes include the addition of the Cockpit server-management tool, a 6.4 kernel, GNOME 45, and many other upgrades. This release also removes a long list of unmaintained Python packages. See the release notes for details.

The extensible scheduler class ("sched_ext") framework allows the writing of CPU schedulers as a set of BPF programs. It has been somewhat controversial, and its merging into the kernel has been blocked despite a clear level of interest from users. Linus Torvalds has now let it be known that he has made a decision and, overriding the scheduler maintainer, will merge sched_ext for the 6.11 release.

I honestly see no reason to delay this any more. This whole patchset was the major (private) discussion at last year's kernel maintainer summit, and I don't find any value in having the same discussion (whether off-list or as an actual event) at the upcoming maintainer summit one year later, so to make any kind of sane progress, my current plan is to merge this for 6.11.

Version 127.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include support for DNS prefetching and the ability to close duplicate tabs in a window. The browser will now try to upgrade images and videos with HTTP URLs that are found in an HTTPS page to HTTPS as well; if that fails, the non-HTTPS resources will simply fail to load.

Update: this Mozilla Security Blog post describes the HTTPS-related changes in detail.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ruby:3.3), Fedora (efifs, libvirt, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, and strongswan), Red Hat (firefox, idm:DL1, ipa, nghttp2, and thunderbird), SUSE (aws-nitro-enclaves-cli, cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, containerized-data-importer, frr, glibc, go1.21, go1.22, gstreamer-plugins-base, kernel, kernel-firmware-nvidia-gspx-G06, nvidia-open- driver-G06-signed, libxml2, mariadb, poppler, python-Brotli, python-docker, python-idna, rmt-server, skopeo, sssd, unbound, unrar, util-linux, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (giflib, libphp-adodb, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-laptop, linux-oem-6.8, nodejs, and tiff).

P4, short for "Programming Protocol-independent Packet Processors", is a programming language aimed at networking devices; it is useful for the configuration of firewalls and complicated routing architectures. Since a lot of advanced networking is done with Linux systems, it stands to reason that there would be value in supporting P4 and, indeed, an implementation of P4 in the kernel's traffic-control subsystem was first posted by Jamal Hadi Salim at the beginning of 2023. After nearly 18 months, though, this feature has not been merged, and the chances of that happening would appear to be getting worse.

Version 5.40.0 of the Perl language has been released. "Perl 5.40.0 represents approximately 11 months of development since Perl 5.38.0 and contains approximately 160,000 lines of changes across 1,500 files from 75 authors". Significant changes include a new __CLASS__ keyword, a :reader attribute for field variables, a new "^^" logical-XOR operator (because two of those were not enough), moving "try/catch" out of the experimental category, and more; see this page for lots of details.

The 6.10-rc3 kernel prepatch is out. "So things look good, the water is warm, please jump right in and keep testing,"

The kernel's user-space ABI does not lack for ring buffers; they have been defined for subsystems like BPF, io_uring, perf, and tracing, for example. Naturally, each of those ring buffers is unique, with no common interface between them. The natural response to this ABI proliferation is, of course, to add yet another ring buffer as the generic option; that is the intent of this patch series from Kent Overstreet adding a new set of system calls for ring buffers.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 6, 2024 is available.

We have just received the sad news that longtime core BSD developer Mike Karels has died; he will certainly be missed.

Version 6.2 of the Incus container-management system is out. "This release contains the second wave of changes contributed by students of the University of Texas at Austin and a few other features and improvements." The features include a new incus top command, a new API for system load information, and more.

In the recent discussion on commenting at LWN, several readers asked for the ability to hide subthreads of a long comment stream. That feature has just been added; it is also integrated with the three comment-display modes and with comment filtering, removing the need for JavaScript for filtering. Hiding is not persistent; no extra data is stored at either end.

Give it a try; if you have comments on the new mechanism, this is the place to put them.

Security updates have been issued by Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, git, libreoffice, microcode, python-requests, webkit2, and wireshark), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, glibc, go-toolset:ol8, idm:DL1 and idm:client, less, python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9, ruby:3.0, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (nodejs, nodejs:18, python-idna, and ruby:3.1), and SUSE (389-ds, ffmpeg, ffmpeg-4, gnutls, gstreamer-plugins-base, libhtp, mariadb104, poppler, python-python-jose, squid, and unbound).

The second 6.10 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Nothing feels particularly odd, but rc2 is usually fairly small and people are only starting to find regressions. So please go test some more."

The "pidfdfs" virtual filesystem was added to the 6.9 kernel release as a way to export better information about running processes to user space. It replaced a previous implementation in a way that was, on its surface, fully compatible while adding a number of new capabilities. This transition, which was intended to be entirely invisible to existing applications, already ran into trouble in March, when a misunderstanding with SELinux caused systems with pidfdfs to fail to boot properly. That problem was quickly fixed, but it turns out that there was one more surprise in store, showing just how hard ABI compatibility can be at times.

The 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit will happen on September 17 in Vienna, Austria; it is an invitation-only event for a small group to discuss important kernel-development problems. The call for proposals for this gathering has now been posted. One of the best ways to be invited to the event is to propose a topic that needs discussion in that forum. The deadline for proposals is June 18.

The developers of the Krita painting application are celebrating 25 years of development with a detailed history of the project.

A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 30, 2024 is available.

When redesigning the LWN site in 2002, we thought long and hard about whether the ability to post comments should be part of it; LWN had not offered that feature for the first four years of its existence. There were already plenty of examples of how comments can go bad by then, but we decided to trust our readers to keep things under control. Much of the time, that trust has proved justified, but there have been times where things have not gone so well. This time is quickly becoming one of those others.