Vue lecture
[$] Development statistics for the 6.10 kernel
The 6.10 kernel has been released
So the final week was perhaps not quite as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don't love - but it also wasn't noisy enough to warrant an extra rc.
Changes in 6.10 include the removal of support for some ancient Alpha CPUs, shadow-stack support for the x32 sub-architecture, Rust-language support on RISC-V systems, support for some Windows NT synchronization primitives (though it is marked "broken" in 6.10), the mseal() system call, fsverity support in the FUSE filesystem subsystem, ioctl() support in the Landlock security module, the memory-allocation profiling subsystem, and more.
See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.10 page for more details.
[$] Reports from OSPM 2024, part 1
An empirical study of Rust for Linux
Despite more novice developers being attracted by Rust to the kernel community, we have found their commits are mainly for constructing Rust-relevant toolchains as well as Rust crates alone; they do not, however, take part in kernel code development. By contrast, 5 out of 6 investigated drivers (as seen in Table 5) are mainly contributed by authors from the Linux community. This implies a disconnection be- tween the young and the seasoned developers, and that the bar of kernel programming is not lowered by Rust language.
As a bonus, it includes a ChatGPT analysis of LWN and Hacker News comments.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 11, 2024
Firefox 128.0 released
Another OpenSSH remote code execution vulnerability
The main difference from CVE-2024-6387 is that the race condition and RCE potential are triggered in the privsep child process, which runs with reduced privileges compared to the parent server process. So immediate impact is lower. However, there may be differences in exploitability of these vulnerabilities in a particular scenario, which could make either one of these a more attractive choice for an attacker, and if only one of these is fixed or mitigated then the other becomes more relevant.
Security updates for Tuesday
Stable kernel update 6.6.38
All powerpc and arm64 users of the 6.6 kernel series must upgrade. Everyone else probably should as well to be safe."
GDB 15.1 released
Kernel prepatch 6.10-rc7
Things remain calm, although I do suspect that part of it is that it's been the July 4th week in the US, and a lot of Europe is starting to go away on summer vacation.But hey, let's not look a gift horse too closely in the mouth. Maybe it's really just that 6.10 is shaping up well. Right? RIGHT?
[$] Another try for getrandom() in the vDSO
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 4, 2024
Rosenthal: X Window System At 40
A major reason for Sun's early success was that they in effect open-sourced the Network File System. X11 was open source under the MIT license. I, and some of the other Sun engineers, understood that NeWS could not displace X11 as the Unix standard window system without being equally open source. But Sun's management looked at NeWS and saw superior technology, an extension of the PostScript that Adobe was selling, and couldn't bring themselves to give it away.