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Meson 1.8.0 released

Par :jzb
29 avril 2025 à 15:16

Version 1.8.0 of the Meson build system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the ability to run rustdoc for Rust projects, support for the c2y and gnu2y compiler options, and a new argument (android_exe_type) that makes it possible to use the same meson.build file for Android and non-Android systems.

LWN's Mastodon migration

Par :corbet
29 avril 2025 à 19:29
The LWN.net fediverse (Mastodon) feed has moved; we are now known as @LWN@lwn.net. The migration magic has shifted many of our followers over automatically but, if you follow that stream, you might want to make sure that you have shifted to the new source.

Security updates for Wednesday

Par :jzb
30 avril 2025 à 13:33
Security updates have been issued by Debian (glibc and libraw), Fedora (digikam, icecat, mingw-LibRaw, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, and perl-PAR-Packer), Red Hat (ghostscript, kernel, and kernel-rt), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (augeas, firefox, and java-11-openjdk), and Ubuntu (binutils, libxml2, and nodejs).

How LWN is faring in 2025

Par :corbet
30 avril 2025 à 14:37
Just over six months ago, The Economist described the US economy as "the envy of the world". That headline would be unlikely to appear now. The economic boom referenced in that article feels like a distant memory, markets are falling, and uncertainty is at an all-time high. Like everybody else, LWN is affected by the current turbulence in the political and economic spheres; we expect to get through this period, but there will be some challenges.

The conclusion of the FSF board review

Par :corbet
30 avril 2025 à 15:42
The Free Software Foundation has announced the completion of the review of its board of directors; the process resulted in the reconfirmation of all five sitting board members.

The review examined board members Ian Kelling, Geoffrey Knauth, Henry Poole, Richard Stallman, and Gerald Sussman. The process generated detailed philosophical and policy discussions between board members and the FSF's global associate members on topics ranging from the firmness of the Free Software Definition, developments in machine learning, to the board's president position.

[$] Better debugging information for inlined kernel functions

Par :daroc
30 avril 2025 à 16:10

Modern compilers perform a lot of optimizations, which can complicate debugging. Song Liu and Thierry Treyer spoke about a potential improvement to BPF Type Format (BTF) debugging information that could partially combat that problem at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. They want to add information on selectively inlined functions to BTF in order to better support tracing tools. Treyer participated remotely.

[$] The mystery of the Mailman 2 CVEs

Par :jzb
30 avril 2025 à 17:06

Many eyebrows were raised recently when three vulnerabilities were announced that allegedly impact GNU Mailman 2.1, since many folks assumed that it was no longer being supported. That's not quite the case. Even though version 3 of the GNU Mailman mailing-list manager has been available since 2015, and version 2 was declared (mostly) end of life (EOL) in 2020, there are still plenty of users and projects still using version 2.1.x. There is, as it turns out, a big difference between mostly EOL and actually EOL. For example: WebPros, the company behind the cPanel server and web-site-management platform, still maintains a port of Mailman 2.1.x to Python 3 for its customers and was quick to respond to reports of vulnerabilities. However, the company and upstream Mailman project dispute that the CVEs are valid.

Albertson: Future of OSL in Jeopardy

Par :corbet
30 avril 2025 à 20:06
Lance Albertson writes that the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, the home of many prominent free-software projects over the years, has run into financial trouble:

I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab. Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While OSU's College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding have led to a significant reduction in CoE's budget. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable and CoE needs to find ways to cut programs.

Earlier this week, I was informed that unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will be forced to shut down later this year.

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 1, 2025

Par :corbet
1 mai 2025 à 00:19
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

  • Front: Mailman 2 vulnerabilities; AI in Debian; __nonstring__; Cache-aware scheduling; Freezing filesystems; Socket-level storage; Debugging information; LWN in 2025.
  • Briefs: Debian election; Kali Linux key; OpenBSD 7.7; Firefox 138.0; GCC 15.1; Meson 1.8.0; Valgrind 3.25.0; FSF review; OSI retrospective; Mastodon; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Security updates for Thursday

Par :jake
1 mai 2025 à 13:37
Security updates have been issued by Debian (expat, fig2dev, firefox-esr, golang-github-gorilla-csrf, jinja2, libxml2, nagvis, qemu, request-tracker4, request-tracker5, u-boot, and vips), Fedora (firefox, giflib, and thunderbird), Mageia (imagemagick), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (amber-cli, libjxl, and redis), and Ubuntu (h2o, poppler, and postgresql-10).

[$] Custom out-of-memory killers in BPF

Par :corbet
1 mai 2025 à 13:51
The out-of-memory (OOM) killer has long been a scary and controversial part of the Linux kernel. It is summoned from some dark place when the system as a whole (or, more recently, any given control group) is running so low on memory that further allocations are not possible; its job is to kill off processes until a sufficient amount of memory has been freed. Roman Gushchin has found a way to make the OOM killer even scarier: adding the ability to load custom OOM killers in BPF.

Celebrating 20 Years of the OASIS Open Document Format

Par :jzb
1 mai 2025 à 16:05

The Document Foundation is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ratification of the Open Document Format (ODF) as an OASIS standard.

Two decades after its approval in 2005, ODF is the only open standard for office documents, promoting digital independence, interoperability and content transparency worldwide. [...]

To celebrate this milestone, from today The Document Foundation will be publishing a series of presentations and documents on its blog that illustrate the unique features of ODF, tracing its history from the development and standardisation process through the activities of the Technical Committee for the submission of version 1.3 to ISO and the standardisation of version 1.4.

Redis is now available under the AGPLv3 open source license (Redis blog)

Par :jake
1 mai 2025 à 17:47
After a somewhat tumultuous switch to the Server Side Public License (SSPL) in March 2024, Redis has backtracked and is now offering Redis under the Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) starting with Redis 8, CEO Rowan Trollope announced. The change back to an open-source license was led by Redis creator Salvatore "antirez" Sanfillipo, who also contributed the new Vector Sets feature for the release. He said:
I'll be honest: I truly wanted the code I wrote for the new Vector Sets data type to be released under an open source license. Writing open source software is too rooted in me: I rarely wrote anything else in my career. I'm too old to start now. This may be childish, but I wrote Vector Sets with a huge amount of enthusiasm exactly because I knew Redis (and my new work) was going to be open source again.

I understand that the core of our work is to improve Redis, to continue building a good system, useful, simple, able to change with the requirements of the software stack. Yet, returning back to an open source license is the basis for such efforts to be coherent with the Redis project, to be accepted by the user base, and to contribute to a human collective effort that is larger than any single company. So, honestly, while I can't take credit for the license switch, I hope I contributed a little bit to it, because today I'm happy. I'm happy that Redis is open source software again, under the terms of the AGPLv3 license.

Since last year's license switch, though, the Valkey project has sprung up as a fork under the original 3-clause BSD license.

Security updates for Friday

Par :daroc
2 mai 2025 à 13:20
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, nodejs, openjdk-17, and thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, golang-github-nvidia-container-toolkit, and thunderbird), Mageia (kernel), Oracle (ghostscript, glibc, kernel, libxslt, php:8.1, and thunderbird), SUSE (cmctl, firefox-esr, govulncheck-vulndb, java-21-openjdk, libxml2, poppler, python-h11, and redis), and Ubuntu (docker.io, ghostscript, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and micropython).

[$] Flexible data placement

Par :jake
2 mai 2025 à 17:51
At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) Kanchan Joshi and Keith Busch led a combined storage and filesystem session on data placement, which concerns how the data on a storage device is actually written. In a discussion that hearkened back to previous summits, the idea is to give hints to enterprise-class SSDs to help them make better choices on where the data should go; hinting was most recently discussed at the summit in 2023. If SSDs can group data with similar lifetimes together, it can lead to longer life for the devices, but there is a need to work out the details.

Security updates for Monday

Par :jake
5 mai 2025 à 13:31
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ansible, containerd, and vips), Fedora (chromium, java-17-openjdk, nodejs-bash-language-server, nodejs-pnpm, ntpd-rs, redis, rust-hickory-proto, thunderbird, and valkey), Mageia (apache-mod_auth_openidc, fcgi, graphicsmagick, kernel-linus, pam, poppler, and tomcat), Red Hat (firefox, libsoup, nodejs:20, redis:6, rsync, webkit2gtk3, xmlrpc-c, and yelp), and SUSE (audiofile, ffmpeg, firefox, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libva, libxml2, and thunderbird).

[$] Injecting speculation barriers into BPF programs

Par :corbet
5 mai 2025 à 19:04
The disclosure of the Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities created a lot of pain for kernel developers (and many others). That pain was especially acutely felt in the BPF community. While an attacker might have to painfully search the kernel code base for exploitable code, an attacker using BPF can simply write and load their own speculation gadgets, which is a much more efficient way of operating. The BPF community reacted by, among other things, disallowing the loading of programs that may include speculation gadgets. Luis Gerhorst would like to change that situation with this patch series that takes a more direct approach to the problem.
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