Vue lecture
[$] Memory-allocation profiling for the kernel
AlmaLinux forms engineering steering committee
The AlmaLinux project has announced the formation of the AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee (ALESCo):
[It] is dedicated to guiding the technical direction of the AlmaLinux distribution on a day-to-day basis within the guidelines set forth by the board, ensuring its robustness, reliability, sustainability, and relevance in the open-source ecosystem. ALESCo will work collaboratively with, and oversee relevant technical-focused Special Interest Groups (SIGs) to achieve these goals. It is "air traffic control" for engineering matters.
The initial members of ALESCo appointed by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board are Andrew Lukoshko, Ben Thomas, Cody Robertson, Elkhan Mammadli, Jonathan Wright, and Neal Gompa. The AlmaLinux Wiki has more information on the committee's activities and how to get involved.
[$] Dynamically sizing the kernel stack
[$] Facing down mapcount madness
Security updates for Tuesday
[$] What's next for the SLUB allocator
[$] A plan to make BPF kfuncs polymorphic
David Vernet kicked off the BPF track at 2024's BPF track at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit with a talk about polymorphic kfuncs — or, with less jargon, kernel functions that can be called from BPF which use different implementations depending on context. He explained how this would be useful to the sched_ext BPF scheduling framework, but expected it to be helpful in other areas as well.
[$] Better support for locally-attached-memory tiering
[$] Trinity keeps KDE 3 on life support
As the shiny new KDE Plasma 6 desktop makes its way into distribution releases, a small group of developers is still trying to preserve the KDE experience circa 2008. The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), is a continuation of KDE 3 that has maintained the old-school desktop with semi-regular releases since 2010. The most recent release, R14.1.2, was announced on April 28. TDE does deliver a usable retro desktop, but with some limitations that hamper its usability on modern systems.
Axboe: What's new with io_uring in 6.10
Bundles are multiple buffers used in a single operation. On the receive side, this means a single receive may utilize multiple buffers, reducing the roundtrip through the networking stack from N per N buffers to just a single one. On the send side, this also enables better handling of how an application deals with sends from a socket, eliminating the need to serialize sends on a single socket. Bundles work with provided buffers, hence this feature also adds support for provided buffers for send operations.
Security updates for Monday
[$] Extending the mempolicy interface for heterogeneous systems
[$] GitLab CI for the kernel
Working on the Linux kernel has always been unlike working on many other software projects. One particularly noticeable difference is the decentralized nature of the kernel's testing infrastructure. Projects such as syzkaller, KernelCI, or the kernel self tests test the kernel in different ways. On February 28, Helen Koike posted a patch set that would add continuous integration (CI) scripts for the whole kernel. The response was generally positive, but several people suggested changes.
[$] An update and future plans for DAMON
Security updates for Friday
White paper: Vendor Kernels, Bugs and Stability
This means that over time, the security of the RHEL kernels get worse and worse as more issues are discovered in the upstream code and are potentially exploitable but fewer and fewer of the fixes for these known bugs are back-ported into RHEL kernels.After reaching RHEL 8.7, the theory is that the kernel has been stabilized, with a corresponding improvement in security. However we still have an influx of newly discovered bugs in the upstream kernel affecting RHEL 8.7 that are not addressed. Each minor version of upstream is released on an approximately quarterly basis and we can see that the influx of new bugs that are unaddressed in RHEL is growing. The number of known issues in these kernels increases by approximately 250 new bugs per quarter or more.