Vue lecture
Incus 6.2 released
This release contains the second wave of changes contributed by students of the University of Texas at Austin and a few other features and improvements." The features include a new incus top command, a new API for system load information, and more.
New site feature: comment subthread hiding
Give it a try; if you have comments on the new mechanism, this is the place to put them.
[$] Handling the NFS change attribute
[$] An instruction-level BPF memory model
There are few topics as arcane as memory models, so it was a pleasant surprise when the double-length session on the BPF memory model at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit turned out to be understandable. Paul McKenney led the session, although he was clear that the work he was presenting was also due to Puranjay Mohan, who unfortunately could not attend the summit. BPF does not actually have a formalized memory model yet; instead it has relied on a history of talks like this one and a general informal understanding. Unfortunately, ignoring memory models does not make them go away, and this has already caused at least one BPF-related bug on weakly-ordered architectures. Figuring out what a formal memory model for BPF should define was the focus of McKenney's talk.
Security updates for Tuesday
LyX 2.4.0 Released
Version 2.4.0 of the LyX document processor has been released. LyX is a "What You See Is What You Mean" (WYSIWYM) application that offers GUI editing of LaTeX documents with import and export to PDF, HTML, OpenDocument, Word, and other formats. LyX 2.4.0 is the first major release in six years, and brings support for EPUB, DocBook 5, improved table styles, and now uses Unicode (utf8) as its default encoding. See the full list of new features on the LyX wiki, and release notes for information on known issues and caveats for those upgrading from earlier versions of LyX.
[$] Debian's /tmpest in a teapot
Debian had a major discussion
about mounting /tmp as a RAM-based tmpfs in 2012 but inertia
won out in the end. Debian systems have continued to
store temporary files on disk by default. Until now. A mere
12 years later, the project will be switching to a RAM-based /tmp in the Debian
13 ("Trixie") release. Additionally, starting with Trixie, the
default will be to periodically clean up temporary files automatically in
Security updates for Monday
mini-mass-rebuild" that updated the toolchain to Rust 1.78 and picked up fixes for various pieces), Mageia (gifsicle, netatalk, openssl, python-jinja2, and unbound), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (bind, glibc, gstreamer-plugins-base, squid, and tiff), and Ubuntu (glibc).
Kernel prepatch 6.10-rc2
Nothing feels particularly odd, but rc2 is usually fairly small and people are only starting to find regressions. So please go test some more."
Fedora Linux 40 election results
The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 40 election cycle. Four seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Stephen Gallagher, Neal Gompa, Michel Lind, and Fabio Valentini. The Fedora Council had two seats open, and the winners are Aleksandra Fedorova and Adam Samalik. One seat was open on the Fedora Mindshare Committee, and the winner is Sumantro Mukherjee. Four seats were open for the first election to select members of the EPEL Steering Committee, which went to Troy Dawson, Kevin Fenzi, Carl George, and Jonathan Wright.
Opt Green: KDE Eco's New Sustainable Software Project
KDE Eco, a KDE project focused on reducing software's environmental impact, has announced its Opt Green campaign to reduce e-waste:
Over the next two years, the "Opt Green" initiative will bring what KDE Eco has been doing for sustainable software directly to end users. A particular target group for the project is those whose consumer behavior is driven by principles related to the environment, and not just price or convenience: the "eco-consumers".
Through online and offline campaigns as well as installation workshops, we will demonstrate the power of Free Software to drive down resource and energy consumption, and keep devices in use for the lifespan of the hardware, not the software.
Our motto: The most environmentally-friendly device is the one you already own.
See the KDE Eco Get Involved page for more information on how to participate.
[$] One more pidfdfs surprise
CFP: the 2024 Kernel Maintainers Summit
25 Years of Krita
A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.
Security updates for Friday
[$] Standardizing the BPF ISA
While BPF may be most famous for its use in the Linux kernel, there is actually a growing effort to standardize BPF for use on other systems. These include eBPF for Windows, but also uBPF, rBPF, hBPF, bpftime, and others. Some hardware manufacturers are even considering integrating BPF directly into networking hardware. Dave Thaler led two sessions about all of the problems that cross-platform use inevitably brings and the current status of the standardization work at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit.