Version 4.0.0 of the LibreSSL TLS/cryptography stack has been released. Changes include a cleanup of the MD4 and MD5 implementations, removal of unused DSA methods, changes in libtls protocol parsing to ignore unsupported TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.0 protocols, and many more internal changes and bug fixes.

Paul McKenney gave a presentation at Kangrejos this year that wasn't (directly) related to Rust. Instead, he spoke about the work he has been doing in concert with many other contributors on improving the handling of subtle concurrency problems in C++. Although he cautioned that his talk was only an overview, and not a substitute for reading the relevant papers, he hoped that the things the C++ community is working on would be of interest to the Rust developers present as well, and potentially inform future work on the language. McKenney's talk was, as is his style, full of subtle examples of weird multithreaded behavior. Interested readers may wish to refer to his slides in an attempt to follow along.

Version 1.4 of the Inkscape open-source vector-graphics editor has been released. Highlights of this release include a filter gallery, import for Affinity Designer files, internal links in exported PDFs, and more. See the release notes for all of the new features. LWN previewed the 1.4 release in early October.

It is too early to say what the outcome will be in the ongoing fight between Automattic and WP Engine, but the WordPress community at large is already the loser. Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg has been using his control of the project, and the WordPress.org infrastructure, to punish WP Engine and remove some dissenting contributors from discussion channels. Most recently, Mullenweg has instituted a hostile fork of a WP Engine plugin and the forked plugin is replacing the original via WordPress updates.

So the diffstat looks a bit odd, because one of the fixes here caused the UTF tables to be regenerated, and an effective one-liner change turned into 6703 lines of diff.

But if you ignore that effect, everything looks normal.

At Kangrejos, Gary Guo wanted to discuss three problems with the way Rust and C code in the kernel interact: mismatched types, too many type casts, and the overhead of helper functions. To fix the first two problems, Guo proposed changing the way the kernel maps C types into Rust types. The last problem was a bit trickier, but he has a clever workaround for that, based on tricking the compiler into inlining the helper functions across language boundaries.

Version 24.10 of the Ubuntu distribution is out. This release includes GNOME 47, Linux 6.11, security enhancements for managing Personal Package Archives (PPAs), experimental security controls for Snap packages, and more.

Bindgen is a widely used tool that automatically generates Rust bindings from C headers. The Rust-for-Linux project uses it to create some of the bindings between Rust code and the rest of the kernel. John Baublitz presented at Kangrejos about the improvements that he has made to the tool in order to make the generated bindings easier to use, including improved support for macros, bitfields, and enums.

The Julia project has released version 1.11.0. A separate blog post covers some of the highlights. The release includes a number of helpful features.

In previous Julia versions, there was no "programmatic way" of knowing if an unexported name was considered part of the public API or not. Instead, the guideline was basically that if it was not in the manual then it was not public which was a bit underwhelming. To remedy that, there is now a public keyword in Julia that can be used to indicate that an unexported name is part of the public API.

In the early days of open source, it was a struggle to get companies to accept the concept and trust its development model. Now, companies have few qualms about using it, but do tend to take open source and those who maintain it for granted. The struggle now is to find ways to compensate producers of the software, sustain the open‑source commons, and avoid burning out maintainers. The Open Source Pledge project is an effort to persuade companies to pay maintainers by making it a social norm. On October 8, the project is launching a marketing campaign to raise awareness and try to get a larger conversation started around paying maintainers.

Alice Ryhl has been working to enable tracepoints — which are widely used throughout the kernel — to be seamlessly placed in Rust code as well. She spoke about her approach at Kangrejos. Her patch set enables efficient use of static tracepoints, but supporting dynamic tracepoints will take some additional effort.