Security updates have been issued by Fedora (curl, filezilla, flatpak, kubernetes, libfilezilla, thunderbird, and xen), Oracle (go-toolset:ol8, kernel, libreswan, shim, and tigervnc), Red Hat (buildah, gnutls, libreswan, tigervnc, and unbound), SUSE (cockpit-wicked, nrpe, and python-idna), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, freerdp2, linux-azure-6.5, and thunderbird).

The long-running effort to complete the work on stacking (or composing) the Linux security modules (LSMs) recently encountered a barrier—in the form of a "suggestion" to discontinue it from Linus Torvalds. His complaint revolved around the indirect function calls that are used to implement LSMs, but he also did not think much of the effort to switch away from those calls. While it does not appear that a major course-change is in store for LSMs, it is clear that Torvalds is not happy with the direction of that subsystem.

The Debian project leader election results are in and Andreas Tille has been elected. In a fairly competitive vote, Tille beat Sruthi Chandran to fill the position for the coming year. We looked at the election and the candidates a few weeks back.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox and java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (chromium, flatpak, guix, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, thunderbird, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, firefox, glibc, nghttp2, nodejs18, python-aiohttp, python-django3, python-pip, and uxplay), Mageia (putty & filezilla), Red Hat (Firefox, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, nodejs:18, shim, and thunderbird), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration2, nodejs14, perl-CryptX, putty, shim, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.5, linux-hwe-6.5, linux-laptop, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-6.5, linux-oem-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.5, linux-raspi, linux-starfive, linux-starfive-6.5, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, lxd, percona-xtrabackup, and pillow).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, jetty9, libdatetime-timezone-perl, tomcat10, and tzdata), Fedora (cockpit, filezilla, and libfilezilla), Red Hat (firefox, gnutls, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, less, mod_http2, nodejs:18, rhc-worker-script, and shim), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (apache2, glibc, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

Managing to-do lists is something of a universal necessity. While some people handle them mentally or on paper, others resort to a web-based tool or a mobile application. For those preferring the command line, the MIT-licensed Taskwarrior offers a flexible solution with a healthy community and lots of extensions.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (bind, bind and dhcp, bind9.16, gnutls, httpd:2.4/mod_http2, squid:4, and unbound), Debian (kernel, trafficserver, and xorg-server), Fedora (chromium, kernel, libopenmpt, and rust-h2), Mageia (apache-mod_jk, golang, indent, openssl, perl-HTTP-Body, php, rear, ruby-rack, squid, varnish, and xfig), Oracle (bind, squid, unbound, and X.Org server), Red Hat (bind and dhcp and unbound), Slackware (less and php), SUSE (gnutls, python-Pillow, webkit2gtk3, xen, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (yard).

A recent book by LWN guest author Lee Phillips provides a nice introduction to the Julia programming language. Practical Julia does more than that, however. As its subtitle ("A Hands-On Introduction for Scientific Minds") implies, the book focuses on bringing Julia to scientists, rather than programmers, which gives it something of a different feel from most other books of this sort.

The 6.8.4 and 6.6.25 stable kernels have been released. They both contain 11 reversions of workqueue patches.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox and thunderbird), Debian (chromium and gtkwave), Fedora (micropython), Slackware (xorg), SUSE (util-linux and xen), and Ubuntu (firefox).

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (xz), Debian (libvirt, mediawiki, util-linux, and xz-utils), Fedora (apache-commons-configuration, cockpit, ghc-base64, ghc-hakyll, ghc-isocline, ghc-toml-parser, gitit, gnutls, pandoc, pandoc-cli, patat, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, seamonkey, suricata, and xen), Gentoo (XZ utils), Mageia (aide & mhash, emacs, microcode, opensc, and squid), Red Hat (ruby:3.1), and SUSE (kanidm and qpid-proton).

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (perl-Data-UUID, python-pygments, and thunderbird), Mageia (clojure, grub2, kernel,kmod-xtables-addons,kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, nss firefox, nss, python3, python, tcpreplay, and thunderbird), Oracle (nodejs:18), Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and dnsmasq), SUSE (avahi and python39), and Ubuntu (curl, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, unixodbc, and util-linux).

Sasha Levin has announced the release of the 6.8.2, 6.7.11, 6.6.23, 6.1.83, 5.15.153, 5.10.214, 5.4.273, and 4.19.311 stable kernels. Each contains a long list of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (webkitgtk), Mageia (curaengine & blender and gnutls), Red Hat (firefox, grafana, grafana-pcp, libreoffice, nodejs:18, and thunderbird), SUSE (glade), and Ubuntu (crmsh, debian-goodies, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, pam, and thunderbird).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cacti, firefox-esr, freeipa, gross, libnet-cidr-lite-perl, python2.7, python3.7, samba, and thunderbird), Fedora (amavis, chromium, clojure, firefox, gnutls, kubernetes, and tcpreplay), Mageia (freeimage, libreswan, nodejs-hawk, and python, python3), Oracle (golang, nodejs, nodejs:16, and postgresql-jdbc), Slackware (emacs and mozilla), SUSE (dav1d, ghostscript, go1.22, indent, kernel, openvswitch, PackageKit, python-uamqp, rubygem-rack-1_4, shadow, ucode-intel, xen, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (firefox, graphviz, libnet-cidr-lite-perl, and qpdf).

The 6.9-rc1 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus Torvalds described some rather large updates to the core kernel code that are coming for 6.9:

The timer subsystem had a fairly big rewrite, to have per-cpu timer wheels to improve performance of timers, which can be a big deal particularly for networking. The other fairly notable core update is to the workqueue subsystem, where one notable addition is for BH workqueue support. That's notable mainly because it means we finally have a way away from tasklets. The tasklet interface has basically been deprecated for a long while, but we've never really had any good alternatives (with threaded interrupt handlers being one suggested use-case, but not realistic in many cases).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (pdns-recursor and php-dompdf-svg-lib), Fedora (grub2, libreswan, rubygem-yard, and thunderbird), Mageia (libtiff and python-scipy), Red Hat (golang, nodejs, and nodejs:16), Slackware (python3), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.5, linux-hwe-6.5, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, linux-oem-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.5, linux-raspi, linux-starfive, linux-starfive-6.5, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-kvm, linux-laptop, linux-oem-6.1, and linux-raspi).

There are a number of different language-enhancement ideas that crop up with some regularity in the Python community; many of them have been debated and shot down multiple times over the years. When one inevitably arises anew, it can sometimes be difficult to tamp it down, even if it is unlikely that the idea will go any further than the last N times it cropped up. A recent discussion about "real" anonymous functions follows a somewhat predictable path, but there are still reasons to participate in vetting these "new" ideas, despite the tiresome, repetitive nature of the exercise—examples of recurring feature ideas that were eventually adopted definitely exist.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl, spip, and unadf), Fedora (chromium, iwd, opensc, openvswitch, python3.6, shim, shim-unsigned-aarch64, and shim-unsigned-x64), Mageia (batik, imagemagick, irssi, jackson-databind, jupyter-notebook, ncurses, and yajl), Oracle (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, and dnsmasq), Red Hat (postgresql:10), SUSE (chromium, kernel, openvswitch, python-rpyc, and tiff), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8).