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Reçu aujourd’hui — 18 mai 2025LWN
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[$] A kernel developer plays with Home Assistant: case studies

Par :corbet
16 mai 2025 à 13:29
The first article in this series provided an overview of Home Assistant, its community, and its capabilities. It was deliberately short on descriptions of interesting things that can be done with Home Assistant, though — the reasons why one might actually want to use this program. In this closing article, we'll look at how Home Assistant was used to solve some real problems.

An Asahi Linux 6.15 progress report

Par :jzb
16 mai 2025 à 13:26

The Asahi Linux project, which supports Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, has published a progress report ahead of the 6.15 kernel's release.

We are pleased to announce that our graphics driver userspace API (uAPI) has been merged into the Linux kernel. This major milestone allows us to finally enable OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan support for Apple Silicon in upstream Mesa. This is the only time a graphics driver's uAPI has been merged into the kernel independent of the driver itself, which was kindly allowed by the kernel graphics subsystem (DRM) maintainers to facilitate upstream Mesa enablement while the required Rust abstractions make their way upstream. We are grateful for this one-off exception, made possible with close collaboration with the kernel community.

Security updates for Friday

Par :jzb
16 mai 2025 à 13:10
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, kernel, kernel-rt, redis:6, and yelp and yelp-xsl), Debian (chromium), Red Hat (compat-openssl11, kernel, and thunderbird), and SUSE (nbdkit, open-vm-tools, and rustup).

In Memoriam: John L. Young (EFF)

Par :corbet
16 mai 2025 à 08:26
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted a somewhat belated memorial for John Young, the founder of Cryptome.

John was one of the early, under-recognized heroes of the digital age. He not only saw the promise of digital technology to help democratize access to information, he brought that idea into being and nurtured it for many years. We will miss him and his unswerving commitment to the public's right to know.

[$] A new DMA-mapping API

Par :jake
15 mai 2025 à 14:26
Leon Romanovsky began his session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) by explaining that the improved DMA-mapping API that he has been working on is a group effort. He, Chaitanya Kulkarni, Christoph Hellwig, Jason Gunthorpe, and others are proposing to modernize the API and to "make it more suitable for current kernels". He told the assembled storage and filesystem developers that the progress on the proposal has stalled, but that it was the basis for further work in various areas, so he hoped to find a way to move forward with it.

Oniux: kernel-level Tor isolation for Linux applications

Par :jzb
15 mai 2025 à 14:19

The Tor project has announced the oniux utility which provides Tor network isolation, using Linux namespaces, for third-party applications.

Namespaces are a powerful feature that gives us the ability to isolate Tor network access of an arbitrary application. We put each application in a network namespace that doesn't provide access to system-wide network interfaces (such as eth0), and instead provides a custom network interface onion0.

This allows us to isolate an arbitrary application over Tor in the most secure way possible software-wise, namely by relying on a security primitive offered by the operating system kernel. Unlike SOCKS, the application cannot accidentally leak data by failing to make some connection via the configured SOCKS, which may happen due to a mistake by the developer.

The Tor project cautions that oniux is considered experimental as the software it depends on, such as Arti and onionmasq, are still new.

Security updates for Thursday

Par :jake
15 mai 2025 à 14:18
Security updates have been issued by Debian (open-vm-tools), Fedora (dnsdist), Gentoo (Node.js and Tracker miners), Red Hat (kernel and xdg-utils), SUSE (audiofile, go1.22-openssl, go1.24, grub2, kernel-devel, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, and python311-Django), and Ubuntu (ruby-rack).

[$] The future of Flatpak

Par :jzb
14 mai 2025 à 19:18

At the Linux Application Summit (LAS) in April, Sebastian Wick said that, by many metrics, Flatpak is doing great. The Flatpak application-packaging format is popular with upstream developers, and with many users. More and more applications are being published in the Flathub application store, and the format is even being adopted by Linux distributions like Fedora. However, he worried that work on the Flatpak project itself had stagnated, and that there were too few developers able to review and merge code beyond basic maintenance.

Podman 5.5.0 released

Par :jzb
14 mai 2025 à 17:37

Version 5.5.0 of the Podman container-management tool has been released. Notable features include the addition of a podman machine cp command to copy files into a running Podman VM, a podman artifact extract command to copy contents of an OCI artifact to disk, and a --mount=artifact option to mount OCI artifacts into containers. See the release announcement for a full list of improvements and bug fixes.

[$] Faster firewalls with bpfilter

Par :daroc
14 mai 2025 à 17:22

From servers in a data center to desktop computers, many devices communicating on a network will eventually have to filter network traffic, whether it's for security or performance reasons. As a result, this is a domain where a lot of work is put into improving performance: a tiny performance improvement can have considerable gains. Bpfilter is a project that allows for packet filtering to easily be done with BPF, which can be faster than other mechanisms.

Security updates for Wednesday

Par :jzb
14 mai 2025 à 13:08
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (emacs, firefox, gnutls, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, osbuild-composer, python39:3.9, and thunderbird), Arch Linux (screen), Debian (varnish), Fedora (chromium), Gentoo (Atop, FreeType, and Spidermonkey), Mageia (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-latest-openjdk and postgresql15, postgresql13), Oracle (389-ds-base, emacs, firefox, kernel, libsoup, libtiff, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, osbuild-composer, python39:3.9, qemu-kvm, ruby, ruby:3.1, ruby:3.3, and thunderbird), Red Hat (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, avahi, buildah, corosync, delve and golang, exiv2, expat, firefox, ghostscript, gimp, git, grafana, gvisor-tap-vsock, java-21-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, libarchive, libjpeg-turbo, libsoup, libsoup3, libxslt, mod_auth_openidc, nginx, nginx:1.22, nginx:1.24, nodejs22, nodejs:20, nodejs:22, opentelemetry-collector, osbuild-composer, perl, php, php:8.2, php:8.3, podman, python-jinja2, redis, redis:7, rhc, ruby:2.5, skopeo, sqlite, thunderbird, tomcat, tomcat9, valkey, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, xterm, xz, yelp, and yggdrasil), Slackware (screen), SUSE (apparmor, dirmngr, gimp, golang-github-prometheus-node_exporter, java-11-openj9, java-17-openj9, java-21-openj9, libxmp-devel, python311-Django4, rabbitmq-server313, rke2, and transfig), and Ubuntu (abseil and open-vm-tools).

[$] A look at what's possible with BPF arenas

Par :daroc
13 mai 2025 à 20:44

BPF arenas are areas of memory where the verifier can safely relax its checking of pointers, allowing programmers to write arbitrary data structures in BPF. Emil Tsalapatis reported on how his team has used arenas in writing sched_ext schedulers at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. His biggest complaint was about the fact that kernel pointers can't be stored in BPF arenas — something that the BPF developers hope to address, although there are some implementation problems that must be sorted out first.

Security updates for Tuesday

Par :corbet
13 mai 2025 à 08:55
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libeconf and rubygems), Fedora (libxmp), Gentoo (glibc), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, libxslt, and virtuoso-opensource), SUSE (augeas, git-lfs, kanidm, and tomcat10), and Ubuntu (linux-lts-xenial).

Multiple security issues in Screen

Par :jzb
12 mai 2025 à 20:58

The SUSE Security Team has published an article detailing several security issues it has uncovered with GNU Screen. This includes a local root exploit when Screen is shipped setuid-root, as it is in some Linux and BSD distributions. The security team also reports problems in coordinating disclosure with the upstream Screen project.

We are not satisfied with how this coordinated disclosure developed, and we will try to be more attentive to such problematic situations early on in the future. This experience also sheds light on the overall situation of Screen upstream. It looks like it suffers from a lack of manpower and expertise, which is worrying for such a widespread open source utility. We hope this publication can help to draw attention to this and to improve this situation in the future.

The article includes a table of operating systems, screen versions, and which vulnerabilities they may be affected by.

Guix project migrating to Codeberg

Par :jzb
12 mai 2025 à 15:32

The Guix project has announced that it is migrating all of its Git repositories, as well as bug tracking and patch tracking, from Savannah to the Codeberg Git forge.

As a user, the main change is that your channels.scm configuration files, if they refer to the git.savannah.gnu.org URL, should be changed to refer to https://codeberg.org/guix/guix.git once migration is complete. But don't worry: guix pull will tell you if/when you need to update your config files and the old URL will remain a mirror for at least a year anyway.

The motivation for the move, which is spelled out in a Guix Consensus Document (GCD), is to improve the contribution experience and improve quality assurance efforts. Migration of Git repositories should be completed by June 7, though they will continue to be mirrored on Savannah until "at least" May 2026. LWN covered Guix in February 2024.

[$] The last of YaST?

Par :jzb
12 mai 2025 à 14:56

The announcement of the openSUSE Leap 16.0 beta contained something of a surprise—along with the usual set of changes and updates, it informed the community of the retirement of "the traditional YaST stack" from Leap. The YaST ("Yet another Setup Tool") installation and configuration utility has been a core part of the openSUSE distribution since its inception in 2005, and part of SUSE Linux since 1996. It will not, immediately, be removed from the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling-release distribution, but its future is uncertain and its fate is up to the larger community to decide.

Security updates for Monday

Par :jake
12 mai 2025 à 14:37
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libbson-xs-perl, postgresql-13, redis, and simplesamlphp), Fedora (chromium, deluge, epiphany, golang-github-nats-io-nkeys, libxmp, nodejs22, perl-Compress-Raw-Lzma, php-adodb, python-h11, and xz), Gentoo (firefox, NVIDIA Drivers, Orc, PAM, and thunderbird), Mageia (libreoffice, python-django, and transfig), Red Hat (emacs, firefox, python39:3.9, and thunderbird), SUSE (bird3, freetype2, ldap-proxy, libmosquitto1, and ruby3.4-rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-aws, and linux-fips).
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