Vue lecture
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Fedora (exim, python-zipp, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, and xmedcon), Red Hat (cups, fence-agents, freeradius, freeradius:3.0, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, podman, and resource-agents), Slackware (htdig and libxml2), SUSE (exim), and Ubuntu (ocsinventory-server, php-cas, and poppler).
[$] Large folios, swap, and FS-Cache
David Howells wanted to discuss swap handling in light of multi-page folios
in a combined storage, filesystem, and memory-management session at
the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Swapping has always been
done with a one-to-one mapping of memory pages to swap slots, he said, but
swapping multi-page folios breaks that assumption. He wondered if it would
make sense to use filesystem techniques to track swapped-out folios.
[$] Imitation, not artificial, intelligence
Simon Willison, co-creator of the popular Django web framework for Python,
gave a keynote presentation at PyCon 2024 on a topic that is
unrelated to that work: large language models (LLMs).
The topic grew out of some other work that he is doing on Datasette, which is a Python-based
"
tool for exploring and publishing data". The talk was a look beyond the hype to try to discover what useful things you can actually do today using these models. Unsurprisingly, there were some cautionary notes from Willison, as well.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (botan2, chromium, ffmpeg, fluent-bit, gtk3, httpd, suricata, tcpreplay, and thunderbird), Mageia (apache, chromium-browser-stable, libfm & libfm-qt, and thunderbird), Oracle (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, libndp, qt5-qtbase, ruby, skopeo, thunderbird, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, firefox, libndp, qt5-qtbase, and thunderbird), SUSE (caddy, chromium, emacs, global, mockito, snakeyaml, testng, and opera), and Ubuntu (thunderbird).
Peter de Schrijver RIP
The sad news that Peter de Schrijver has passed away has just reached us. An obituary in Dutch relates that he passed in a Helsinki hospital on July 12. Mind Software Consulting, which he founded, has a message of condolences as well.
De Schrijver was a Debian Developer and a Linux kernel contributor; he will be missed.
Evolving the ASF Brand (Apache Software Foundation blog)
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
has announced
that it will be changing its logo to remove the feather that has been part
of its brand since 1997. ASF members will have input on the rebranding process and be
able to vote on the new logo, which will be unveiled at the Community Over Code conference in October.
The feather is a well-loved and iconic part of the ASF brand. We know of community members who have ASF feather tattoos. People love taking photos with the feather at our flagship event each year.So why would we change it? As a non-Indigenous entity, we acknowledge that it is inappropriate for the Foundation to use Indigenous themes or language. We thank Natives in Tech and other members of the broader open source community for bringing this issue to the forefront. Today we are announcing we will be retiring the feather icon and logo and replacing it with a new logo that embodies the Foundation's rich history of providing software for the public good.
[$] Filesystem testing for stable kernels
Leah Rumancik led a filesystem-track session at
the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on the testing needed to
qualify
XFS patches for the stable kernels. At last year's summit,
Rumancik, Amir Goldstein, and Chandan Babu Rajendra presented on their efforts to test and
backport fixes for the XFS filesystem to three separate stable kernels.
There has been some longstanding unhappiness in
the XFS-development community
with the stable-kernel process, which led to
backports ceasing for that filesystem until Goldstein started working on XFS testing for the stable
trees a few years ago. In this year's session, Rumancik updated
attendees on how things had gone over the last year and wanted to discuss some
remaining pain points for the process.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (freeradius), Red Hat (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, and java-17-openjdk), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (ghostscript, gnutls, podman, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (linux-hwe-6.5, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, and stunnel).
[$] Changing the filesystem-maintenance model
Maintenance of the kernel is a difficult, often thankless, task; how it is
being handled, the role of maintainers, burnout, and so on are recurring
topics at kernel-related conferences. At
the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Josef Bacik and
Christian Brauner led a session to discuss possible changes to the way
filesystems are maintained, though Bacik took the lead role (and the podium). There are a number of interrelated topics,
including merging new filesystems, removing old ones, making and testing changes
throughout the filesystem tree, and more.
[$] Hierarchical storage management, fanotify, FUSE, and more
Amir Goldstein led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on his project to build a
hierarchical
storage management (HSM) system using fanotify.
The idea is to monitor file access in order to determine when to retrieve
content from non-local storage (e.g. the cloud). The session was a
follow-up to last year's introduction to the
project, which covered some of the problems he had encountered; this
year, he
was updating attendees on its status and progress, along with some other
problem areas that he wanted to discuss.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cups, krb5, pgadmin4, python3.6, and yarnpkg), Mageia (freeradius, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, and dwarves, kernel-linus, and squid), Red Hat (ghostscript, kernel, and less), SUSE (avahi, c-ares, cairo, cups, fdo-client, gdk-pixbuf, git, libarchive, openvswitch3, podman, polkit, python-black, python-Jinja2, python-urllib3, skopeo, squashfs, tiff, traceroute, and wget), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm).
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dotnet6.0, dotnet8.0, fence-agents, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Debian (exim4 and firefox-esr), Fedora (dotnet8.0, firefox, onnx, qt6-qtbase, squid, and wordpress), Mageia (golang, netatalk, php, and poppler), Red Hat (ghostscript, httpd, openssh, python3, and ruby), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel and openssh), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-ibm-5.15, and python3.5, python3.6, python3.7, python3.8, python3.9, python3.10,
python3.11, python3.12).
[$] Improving pseudo filesystems
The eventfs filesystem provides an interface to the tracepoints that are available
to be used by various Linux tracing tools (e.g. ftrace, perf, uprobes,
etc.); it is meant to be a version of the tracefs filesystem that
dynamically allocates its entries as needed. The goal is to reduce the memory
required for multiple instances of tracefs, as Steven Rostedt described in
a session at the 2022
Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. He returned to the 2024
edition of the summit to talk further about how to make pseudo (or virtual)
filesystems, such as tracefs/eventfs, more like regular Linux filesystems,
where the directory entries (dentries) and inodes are only created (and
cached) as needed.
[$] Sxmo: a text-centric mobile user interface
Sxmo, short for "Simple X Mobile", is described on its web site as "
a minimalist environment for Linux mobile devices"; it offers a menu-driven interface that is controlled with the phone's hardware buttons. Sxmo enables the user to send SMS messages from a text editor and is entirely customizable with shell scripts. This peculiar mobile user interface significantly differs from the prevailing approach—but it works.
[$] A new API for tree-in-dcache filesystems
There are a number of kernel filesystems that store their directory entries
directly in the directory-entry cache (dcache) without having any permanent
storage for those objects. It started out as a "neat hack" for ramfs,
Al Viro said, at the start of his filesystem-track session at
the
2024 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Unfortunately, as the use
of this technique has grown into other filesystems, there has been a lot of
scope creep that has gotten out of control. He wanted to discuss some new
infrastructure that he is working on to try to clean some of that up.