The Rust programming language, it is hoped, will bring a new level of safety to the Linux kernel. At the moment, though, there are still a number of impediments to getting useful Rust code into the kernel. In the Embedded Open Source Summit track of the Open Source Summit North America, Fabien Parent provided an overview of his work aimed at improving the infrastructure needed to write the device drivers needed by embedded systems in Rust; there is still some work to be done.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (glibc and samba), Fedora (chromium, cjson, mingw-python-idna, and pgadmin4), Mageia (kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, kernel-linus, and perl-Clipboard), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, golang, java-11-openjdk, kpatch-patch, and shim), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration, glibc, jasper, polkit, and qemu), and Ubuntu (google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.5, pillow, and squid).

The Open Home Foundation has announced its existence as a home and support resource for free home-automation projects.

We created the Open Home Foundation to fight for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And every person who lives in one.

Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming, and so many more—to the Open Home Foundation. This is all about looking into the future. We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware. To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes.

The Debian project leader election results are in and Andreas Tille has been elected. In a fairly competitive vote, Tille beat Sruthi Chandran to fill the position for the coming year. We looked at the election and the candidates a few weeks back.

One of the mainstays of the the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summit is the "fireside chat" (sans fire) between Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel to discuss open source and Linux kernel topics of the day. On April 17, at Open Source Summit North America (OSSNA) in Seattle, Washington, they held with tradition and discussed a range of topics including proper whitespace parsing, security, and the current AI craze.

Peter Hutterer announces udev-hid-bpf, a tool to facilitate the loading of BPF programs that make human-input devices work correctly.

eBPF was originally written for network packet filters but as of kernel v6.3 and thanks to Benjamin, we have BPF in the HID subsystem. HID actually lends itself really well to BPF because, well, we have a byte array and to fix our devices we need to do complicated things like "toggle that bit to zero" or "swap those two values".

See this article for more information on the BPF-HID mechanism.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox and java-1.8.0-openjdk), Debian (chromium, flatpak, guix, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, thunderbird, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, firefox, glibc, nghttp2, nodejs18, python-aiohttp, python-django3, python-pip, and uxplay), Mageia (putty & filezilla), Red Hat (Firefox, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, nodejs:18, shim, and thunderbird), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (apache-commons-configuration2, nodejs14, perl-CryptX, putty, shim, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.5, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.5, linux-hwe-6.5, linux-laptop, linux-lowlatency, linux-nvidia-6.5, linux-oem-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.5, linux-raspi, linux-starfive, linux-starfive-6.5, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, lxd, percona-xtrabackup, and pillow).

Linus has released 6.9-rc5 for testing.

But if you ignore those oddities, it all looks pretty normal and things appear fairly calm. Which is just as well, since the first part of the week I was on a quick trip to Seattle, and the second part of the week I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus.

Gregory Price recently posted a patch set that adds support for weighted memory interleaving — allowing a process's memory to be distributed between non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes in a more controlled way. According to his performance measurements, the patch set could provide a significant improvement for computers with network-attached memory. The patch set also introduces new system calls and paves the way for future extensions intended to give processes more control over their own memory.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnutls, java-17-openjdk, mod_http2, and squid), Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (editorconfig, perl-Clipboard, php, rust, and wordpress), Mageia (less, libreswan, puppet, and x11-server, x11-server-xwayland, and tigervnc), Slackware (aaa_glibc), and SUSE (firefox, graphviz, kernel, nodejs12, pgadmin4, tomcat, and wireshark).

Gentoo Council member Michał Górny posted an RFC to the gentoo-dev mailing list in late February about banning "'AI'-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever) contributions" to the Gentoo Linux project. Górny wrote that the spread of the "AI bubble" indicated a need for Gentoo to formally take a stand on AI tools. After a lengthy discussion, the Gentoo Council voted unanimously this week to adopt his proposal and ban contributions generated with AI/ML tools.

Kernel developers, like conscientious developers for many projects, will often include checks in the code for conditions that are never expected to occur, but which would indicate a serious problem should that expectation turn out to be incorrect. For years, developers have been encouraged (to put it politely) to avoid using assertions that crash the machine for such conditions unless there is truly no alternative. Increasingly, though, use of the kernel's WARN_ON() family of macros, which developers were told to use instead, is also being discouraged.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, jetty9, libdatetime-timezone-perl, tomcat10, and tzdata), Fedora (cockpit, filezilla, and libfilezilla), Red Hat (firefox, gnutls, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, less, mod_http2, nodejs:18, rhc-worker-script, and shim), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (apache2, glibc, and linux-xilinx-zynqmp).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 18, 2024 is available.

Managing to-do lists is something of a universal necessity. While some people handle them mentally or on paper, others resort to a web-based tool or a mobile application. For those preferring the command line, the MIT-licensed Taskwarrior offers a flexible solution with a healthy community and lots of extensions.

The 6.8.7, 6.6.28, 6.1.87, and 5.15.156 stable kernel updates have all been released.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2 and cockpit), Fedora (firefox, kernel, mbedtls, python-cbor2, wireshark, and yyjson), Mageia (nghttp2), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, opencryptoki, pcs, shim, squid, and squid:4), Slackware (firefox), SUSE (emacs, firefox, and kernel), and Ubuntu (linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-aws-6.5, linux-raspi, and linux-iot).

The recent XZ backdoor has sparked a lot of discussion about how the open-source community links and packages software. One possible security improvement being discussed is changing how projects like systemd link to dynamic libraries that are only used for optional functionality: using dlopen() to load those libraries only when required. This could shrink the attack surface exposed by dependencies, but the approach is not without downsides — most prominently, it makes discovering which dynamic libraries a program depends on harder. On April 11, Lennart Poettering proposed one way to eliminate that problem in a systemd RFC on GitHub.

Fedora 40 Beta was released on March 26, and the final release is nearing completion. So far, the release is coming together nicely with major updates for GNOME, KDE Plasma, and the usual cavalcade of smaller updates and enhancements. As part of the release, the project also scuttled Delta RPMs and OpenSSL 1.1.