Vue normale
[$] How free software hijacked Philip Hazel's life
Philip Hazel was 51 when he began the Exim message transfer agent (MTA) project in 1995, which led to the Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) project in 1998. At 80, he's maintained PCRE, and its successor PCRE2, for more than 27 years. For those doing the math, that's a year longer than LWN has been in publication. Exim maintenance was handed off around the time of his retirement in 2007. Now, he is ready to hand off PCRE2 as well, if a successor can be found.
Mate 1.28 released
Version 1.28 of the MATE Desktop has been released.
MATE 1.28 has made significant strides in updating the codebase, including the removal of deprecated libraries and ensuring compatibility with the latest GTK versions. One of the most notable improvements is the enhanced support for Wayland, bringing us closer to a fully native MATE-Wayland experience. Several components have been updated to work seamlessly with Wayland, ensuring a more integrated and responsive desktop environment.
See the announcement for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.
Libgcrypt 1.11.0 released
Version 1.11.0 of Libgcrypt, a general-purpose library of cryptographic building blocks, has been released by the GnuPG project:
This release starts a new stable branch of Libgcrypt with full API and ABI compatibility to the 1.10 series. Over the last years Jussi Kivilinna put again a lot of work into speeding up the algorithms for many commonly used CPUs. Niibe-san implemented new APIs and algorithms and also integrated quantum-resistant encryption algorithms.
[$] Capturing stack traces asynchronously with BPF
Andrii Nakryiko led a session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit giving a look into the APIs for capturing stack traces using BPF, and how the APIs could be made more useful. BPF programs can capture the current stack trace of a running process, including the portion in the kernel during execution of a system call, which can be useful for diagnosing performance problems, among other things. But there are substantial problems with the existing API.
[$] How kernel CVE numbers are assigned
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] Adding a JIT compiler to CPython
[$] BPF tracing performance
On the final day of the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, the BPF track opened with a series of sessions on improving the performance and flexibility of probes and other performance-monitoring tools, in the kernel and in user space. Jiri Olsa led two sessions about different aspects of probes: making the API for BPF programs attached to a probe more flexible, and making user-space probes more efficient.
Plasma 6.1 released
Plasma 6 hits its stride with version 6.1. While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct (and what a massive job that was), 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take you desktop to a new level.
Enhancements include better remote-desktop support, improved customization, persistent apps, smoother animation under Wayland, and more; see the changelog for the full list.
Security updates for Tuesday
[$] Static keys for BPF
The kernel has a lot of code paths that are normally disabled: debugging print statements, tracepoints, etc. To support these efficiently, there is a common mechanism called static keys that provides a way to enable or disable a code path at run time, with effectively no overhead for disabled branches. BPF programs have not been able to take advantage of static keys so far, because they aren't compiled into the kernel. Now, it looks like BPF may be getting support for a similar mechanism — and the design could also provide one of the components needed to support jump tables, another missing feature. Anton Protopovov presented his plans to add static keys to BPF at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit.
PostmarketOS v24.06 released
This release is geared mainly towards Linux enthusiasts. We are working hard on stability improvements and automated testing, but if you expect Android or iOS levels of polish, then this is not for you yet." Changes include an upgrade to Alpine Linux 3.20, newer GNOME and KDE versions, and more.
[$] Nested bottom-half locking for realtime kernels
Security updates for Monday
Kernel prepatch 6.10-rc4
Apart from a rather unusual spike in the diffstat due to a parisc fix, things look normal and pretty small."
Reports from the Python Language Summit
For multiple reasons like being able to fix bugs and single-maintainer modules, CPython doesn't require reviewers on the pull requests of core developers. This can lead to "unilateral action", meaning that a change is introduced into CPython without the review of someone besides the author. Other situations like release managers backporting fixes to other branches without review are common.
Schaller: Fedora Workstation development update – AI edition
Christian Schaller writes about AI and GPU-related features that are in flight and planned for Fedora 41.
Milan Crha has been working together with Alan Day and Jakub Steiner to come up with a streamlined user experience in GNOME Software to let you install the binary NVIDIA driver and provide you with an integrated graphical user interface help to sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. This is a bit different than what we for instance are doing in RHEL, where we are working with NVIDIA to provide pre-signed kernel modules, but that is a lot harder to do in Fedora due to the rapidly updating kernel versions and which most Fedora users appreciate as a big plus. So instead what we are for opting in Fedora is as I said to make it simple for you to self-sign the kernel module for use with secure boot. We are currently looking at when we can make this feature available, but no later than Fedora Workstation 41 for sure.