Vue normale

[$] The ongoing quest for atomic buffered writes

Par : corbet
2 mars 2026 à 22:27
There are many applications that need to be able to write multi-block chunks of data to disk with the assurance that the operation will either complete successfully or fail altogether — that the write will not be partially completed (or "torn"), in other words. For years, kernel developers have worked on providing atomic writes as a way of satisfying that need; see, for example, sessions from the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF (LSFMM+BPF) Summit from 2023, 2024, and 2025 (twice). While atomic direct I/O is now supported by some filesystems, atomic buffered I/O still is not. Filling that gap seems certain to be a 2026 LSFMM+BPF topic but, thanks to an early discussion, the shape of a solution might already be coming into focus.

Høiland-Jørgensen: The inner workings of TCP zero-copy

Par : corbet
2 mars 2026 à 20:12
Toke Høiland-Jørgensen has posted an overview of how zero-copy networking works in the Linux kernel.

Since the memory is being copied directly from userspace to the network device, the userspace application has to keep it around unmodified, until it has finished sending. The sendmsg() syscall itself is asynchronous, and will return without waiting for this. Instead, once the memory buffers are no longer needed by the stack, the kernel will return a notification to userspace that the buffers can be reused.

Texinfo 7.3 released

Par : jzb
2 mars 2026 à 18:47

Version 7.3 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation-formatting system, has been released. It contains a number of new features, performance improvements, and enhancements.

[$] The exploitation paradox in open source

Par : jzb
2 mars 2026 à 15:28

The free and open-source software (FOSS) movements have always been about giving freedom and power to individuals and organizations; throughout that history, though, there have also been actors trying to exploit FOSS to their own advantage. At Configuration Management Camp (CfgMgmtCamp) 2026 in Ghent, Belgium, Richard Fontana described the "exploitation paradox" of open source: the recurring pattern of crises when actors exploit loopholes to restrict freedoms or gain the upper hand over others in the community. He also talked about the attempts to close those loopholes as well as the need to look beyond licenses as a means of keeping freedom alive.

Gram 1.0 released

Par : jzb
2 mars 2026 à 14:58

Version 1.0 of Gram, an "opinionated fork of the Zed code editor", has been released. Gram removes telemetry, AI features, collaboration features, and more. It adds built-in documentation, support for additional languages, and tab-completion features similar to the Supertab plugin for Vim. The mission statement for the project explains:

At first, I tried to build some other efforts I found online to make Zed work without the AI features just so I could check it out, but didn't manage to get them to work. At some point, the curiosity turned into spite. I became determined to not only get the editor to run without all of the misfeatures, but to make it a full-blown fork of the project. Independent of corporate control, in the spirit of Vim and the late Bram Moolenaar who could have added subscription fees and abusive license agreements had he so wanted, but instead gave his work as a gift to the world and asked only for donations to a good cause close to his heart in return.

This is the result. Feel free to build it and see if it works for you. There is no license agreement or subscription beyond the open source license of the code (GPLv3). It is yours now, to do with as you please.

According to a blog post on the site, the plan for the editor is to diverge from Zed and proceed slowly.

Security updates for Monday

Par : jzb
2 mars 2026 à 14:07
Security updates have been issued by Debian (lxd, orthanc, and thunderbird), Fedora (cef, chromium, gimp, nextcloud, pgadmin4, python-django4.2, python-django5, python3-docs, python3.12, python3.13, and python3.9), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8 and mingw-fontconfig), Slackware (gvfs, mozilla, and telnet), SUSE (avahi, cockpit-356, cockpit-podman, cockpit-podman-120, containerized-data-importer, digger-cli, docker, evolution-data-server, expat, firefox, freerdp2, gimp, glib2, glibc, go1, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, gosec, gpg2, heroic-games-launcher, ImageMagick, kernel, kernel-firmware, kubevirt, libIex-3_4-33, libjxl-devel, libpng16, libsodium, libsoup, libsoup2, libssh, libudisks2-0, libwireshark19, protobuf, python-pyasn1, python-urllib3, python311, python311-Flask, rust-keylime, thunderbird, ucode-intel, and valkey), and Ubuntu (git).

Kernel prepatch 7.0-rc2

Par : corbet
2 mars 2026 à 01:07
The 7.0-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. According to Linus:

So I'm not super-happy with how big this is, but I'm hoping it's just the random timing noise we see every once in a while where I just happen to get more pull requests one week, only for the next week to then be quieter.
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