Vue normale
The PostgreSQL community mourns Simon Riggs
Simon was responsible for many of the enterprise features we find in PostgreSQL today, including point in time recovery, hot standby, and synchronous replication. He was the founder of 2ndQuadrant which employed many of the PostgreSQL developers, later becoming part of EDB where he worked as a Postgres Fellow until his retirement. He was responsible for the UK PostgreSQL conferences for many years until he passed that responsibility to PostgreSQL Europe last year.
[$] High-performance computing with Ubuntu
Jason Nucciarone and Felipe Reyes gave back-to-back talks about high-performance computing (HPC) using Ubuntu at SCALE this year. Nucciarone talked about ongoing work packaging Open OnDemand — a web-based HPC cluster interface — to make high-performance-computing clusters more user friendly. Reyes presented on using OpenStack — a cloud-computing platform — to pass the performance benefits of one's hardware through to virtual machines (VMs) running on a cluster.
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center
The GNOME project announced GNOME 46 (code-named "Kathmandu") on March 20. The release has quite a few updates and improvements across user applications, developer tools, and under the hood. One thing stood out while looking over this release—a major emphasis on Flatpaks as the way to acquire and update GNOME software.
Security updates for Tuesday
[$] Nix at SCALE
The first-ever NixCon in North America was co-located with SCALE this year. The event drew a mix of experienced Nix users and people new to the project. I attended talks that covered using Nix to build Docker images, upcoming changes to how NixOS performs early booting, and ideas for making the set of services provided in nixpkgs more useful for self hosting. (LWN covered the relationship between Nix, NixOS, and nixpkgs in a recent article.) Near the end of the conference, a collection of Nix contributors gave a "State of the Union" about the growth of the project and highlighting areas of concern.
[$] The rest of the 6.9 merge window
Security updates for Monday
Emacs 29.3 released
Emacs 29.3 is an emergency bugfix release; it includes no new features except a small number of changes intended to resolve security vulnerabilities uncovered in Emacs 29.2.
Those vulnerabilities mostly have to do with executing untrusted Lisp code; see the NEWS file for a bit more information.
Kernel prepatch 6.9-rc1
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 for Friday
[$] Hardening the kernel against heap-spraying attacks
Security updates for Thursday
Rust 1.77.0 released
Perl 5.39.9 released
Redis is no longer free software
Under the new license, cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge. For example, cloud service providers will be able to deliver Redis 7.4 only after agreeing to licensing terms with Redis, the maintainers of the Redis code.
Distributors like Fedora are already looking at removing Redis as a consequence. (Thanks to Emmanuel Seyman).
The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets
We just started to work on Nova, a Rust-based GSP-only driver for Nvidia GPUs. Nova, in the long term, is intended to serve as the successor of Nouveau for GSP-firmware-based GPUs.With Nova we see the chance to significantly decrease the complexity of the driver compared to Nouveau for mainly two reasons. First, Nouveau's historic architecture, especially around nvif/nvkm, is rather complicated and inflexible and requires major rework to solve certain problems (such as locking hierarchy in VMM / MMU code for VM_BIND currently being solved with a workaround) and second, with a GSP-only driver there is no need to maintain compatibility with pre-GSP code.
Besides that, we also want to take the chance to contribute to the Rust efforts in the kernel and benefit from from more memory safety offered by the Rust programming language.
Given that the effort has just begun, it will be a while before this driver shows up in a distribution release.