Recently, the FreeBSD Foundation has been making progress on improving the operating system's support for modern laptop hardware. The foundation is now looking to expand testing to encompass a wider range of hardware; it has announced a laptop integration testing project to allow the community to easily test FreeBSD's compatibility with laptops and submit the results.
With limited access to testing systems, there's only so much we can do! We hope to work together with volunteers from the community who want FreeBSD to work well on their laptops.
While we expect device hardware and software enumeration to be a fully automated process, we feel that manually-submitted comments about personal experience with FreeBSD are equally valuable. We plan to highlight this commentary on our "matrix of compatibility" webpage for each tested laptop.
We are striving to make it as easy as possible to submit your results. You won't have to worry about environment setup, submission formatting, or any repo-specific details!
See the project repository and testing instructions for more.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.6.133 stable kernel. This reverts a backporting mistake that removed file descriptor checks which led to kernel panics if the fgetxattr, flistxattr, fremovexattr, or fsetxattr functions were called from user space with a file descriptor that did not reference an open file.
GNU GRUB 2, mostly just referred to as GRUB these days, is the most widely used boot loader for x86_64 Linux systems. It supports reading from a vast selection of filesystems, handles booting modern systems with UEFI or legacy systems with a BIOS, and even allows users to customize the "splash" image displayed when a system boots. Alas, all of those features come with a price; GRUB has had a parade of security vulnerabilities over the years. To mitigate some of those problems, Ubuntu core developer and Canonical employee Julian Andres Klode has proposed removing a number of features from GRUB in Ubuntu 26.10 to improve GRUB's security profile. His proposal has not been met with universal acclaim; many of the features Klode would like to remove have vocal proponents.
On April 1, the Gentoo Linux project published a blog post announcing that it was switching to GNU Hurd as its primary kernel as an April Fool's joke. While that is not true, the project has followed up with an announcement of a new Gentoo port to the Hurd:
Our crack team has been working hard to port Gentoo to the Hurd and can now share that they've succeeded, though it remains still in a heavily experimental stage. You can try Gentoo GNU/Hurd using a pre-prepared disk image. The easiest way to do this is with QEMU [...]
We have developed scripts to build this image locally and conveniently work on further development of the Hurd port. Release media like stages and automated image builds are future goals, as is feature parity on x86-64. Further contributions are welcome, encouraged, and needed. Be patient, expect to get your hands dirty, anticipate breakage, and have fun!
Oh, and Gentoo GNU/Hurd also works on real hardware!
Text for the April Fool's post is available at the bottom of the real announcement.
Denver Gingerich of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) has published an article on the impact of the ban on the sale of all new home routers not made in the United States issued by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The SFC, of course, is the organization behind the OpenWrt One router.
Since software updates to already-FCC-approved devices do not require a new FCC approval, it appears the FCC is trying to move beyond its usual authorization procedures to restrict what manufacturers are allowed to push to existing routers. However, the FCC notably does not restrict software changes made by owners of routers in the U.S. In particular, there is no indication that updates people make to their own routers, using software they have sourced themselves, would run afoul of any past or present FCC rule.
As a result, we do not believe that this new FCC decision affects whether and how people can run OpenWrt or other user-selected firmware updates on routers they have already purchased. Not only is this an important right in relation to our ownership and control of our own devices, it also ensures that people can keep their routers secure for far longer than the manufacturer may choose to provide security updates, by allowing them to install up-to-date community software that supports routers for 10, 15, or even more years after their initial release date, as OpenWrt does for many devices.
He also notes that, as the OpenWrt One is already FCC-approved, there should be no impact on its availability in the US. The SFC has asked the FCC for clarification and plans to provide updates when they receive a reply.
OpenSSH 10.3 has been released. Among the many changes in this release are a security fix to address late validation of metacharacters in user names, removal of bug compatibility for SSH implementations that do not support rekeying, and a fix to ensure that scp clears setuid/setgid bits from downloaded files when operating as root in legacy (-O) mode. See the release announcement for a full list of new features, bug fixes, and potentially incompatible changes.
Version 0.0.6 of the Rust-based Servo web browser rendering engine has been released. This release boasts a long list of new features, performance enhancements, improvements, and bug fixes. Some of the notable changes include layout performance improvements, a servo:config page for setting any preference, and developer tools enhancements.
In early March, Dylan M. Taylor submitted a pull request to add a field to store a user's birth date in systemd's JSON user records. This was done to allow applications to store the date to facilitate compliance with age-attestation and -verification laws. It was to be expected that some members of the community would object; the actual response, however, has been shockingly hostile. Some of this has been fueled by a misinformation campaign that has targeted the systemd project and Taylor specifically, resulting in Taylor being doxxed and receiving death threats. Such behavior is not just problematic; it is also deeply misguided given the actual nature of the changes.
SystemRescue 13.00 has been released. The SystemRescue distribution is a live boot system-rescue toolkit, based on Arch Linux, for repairing systems in the event of a crash. This release includes the 6.18.20 LTS kernel, updates bcachefs tools and kernel module to 1.37.3, and many upgraded packages. See the step-by-step guide for instructions on performing common operations such as recovering files, creating disk clones, and resetting lost passwords.
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