On April 11, Brandt Bucher posted PEP 744 ("JIT Compilation"), which summarizes the current state of Python's new copy-and-patch just-in-time (JIT) compiler. The JIT is currently experimental, but the PEP proposes some criteria for the circumstances under which it should become a non-experimental part of Python. The discussion of the PEP hasn't reached a conclusion, but several members of the community have already raised questions about how the JIT would fit into future iterations of the Python language.

This release continues Ubuntu's proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at work through this cycle, together with the community and our partners, to introduce new features and fix bugs.

The list of changes and enhancements is long; click below for some details. More information can be found in the release notes; see also this page for a summary of security-related changes.

BleepingComputer reported on April 20 that some malware was being distributed via GitHub. Uploading files as part of a comment gives them a URL that appears to be associated with a repository, even if the comment is never posted.

A GitHub flaw, or possibly a design decision, is being abused by threat actors to distribute malware using URLs associated with Microsoft repositories, making the files appear trustworthy.

While most of the malware activity has been based around the Microsoft GitHub URLs, this "flaw" could be abused with any public repository on GitHub, allowing threat actors to create very convincing lures.

For several years, contributors to the Rust project have been working to improve support for asynchronous code. The benefits of these efforts are not confined to asynchronous code, however. Members of the Rust community have been working toward adding explicit existential types to Rust since 2017. Existential types are not a common feature of programming languages (something the RFC acknowledges), so the motivation for their inclusion might be somewhat obscure.

We created the Open Home Foundation to fight for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And every person who lives in one.

Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming, and so many more—to the Open Home Foundation. This is all about looking into the future. We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware. To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes.

One of the mainstays of the the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit is the "fireside chat" (sans fire) between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel to discuss open source and Linux kernel topics of the day. On April 17, at Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) in Seattle, Washington, they held with tradition and discussed a range of topics including proper whitespace parsing, security, and the current AI craze.

eBPF was originally written for network packet filters but as of kernel v6.3 and thanks to Benjamin, we have BPF in the HID subsystem. HID actually lends itself really well to BPF because, well, we have a byte array and to fix our devices we need to do complicated things like "toggle that bit to zero" or "swap those two values".

See this article for more information on the BPF-HID mechanism.

But if you ignore those oddities, it all looks pretty normal and things appear fairly calm. Which is just as well, since the first part of the week I was on a quick trip to Seattle, and the second part of the week I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus.

Gregory Price recently posted a patch set that adds support for weighted memory interleaving — allowing a process's memory to be distributed between non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes in a more controlled way. According to his performance measurements, the patch set could provide a significant improvement for computers with network-attached memory. The patch set also introduces new system calls and paves the way for future extensions intended to give processes more control over their own memory.