Vue lecture
[$] Debian debate over tag2upload reaches compromise
Debian's proposed tag2upload service would be worthy of an article even if it wasn't so contentious; tag2upload promises a streamlined way for Debian developers using Git to upload packages to the Debian Archive. But tag2upload has been in limbo for years due to disagreement and a communication breakdown between the team behind tag2upload and the ftpmasters team. It took the threat of a General Resolution (GR), weeks of discussion, and more than 1,000 emails to finally move forward.
Universal Blue images need manual intervention for updates
The Universal Blue project, which produces operating system images based on Fedora's Atomic Desktops, has issued an announcement that manual steps are required to continue receiving updates. Jorge Castro wrote:
If you use Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora, or any other Universal Blue image (including our toolboxes) then you need to follow the instructions in this announcement in order to ensure that your device is getting updates. We were rotating our cosign keypairs this morning, which is the method that we use to sign our images.
During this process I made a critical error which has resulted in forcing you to take manual steps to migrate to our newly signed images.
This applies to all Universal Blue images released before July 2, 2024. See the full announcement for instructions. LWN covered Bluefin in December, 2023.
[$] PostmarketOS: Linux for phones and more
GNU findutils 4.10.0 released
Version 4.10.0 of GNU findutils has been released. Notable changes include allowing find -name / as a valid pattern, and accepting larger UIDs/GIDs for find -user and find -group. It is also once again possible to build findutils on systems with musl-libc.
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.
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] Eliminating indirect calls for security modules
Security updates for Tuesday
Scientific Linux 7 reaches end of life
[$] Arithmetic overflow mitigation in the kernel
On May 7, Kees Cook sent a proposal to the linux-kernel mailing list, asking for the kernel developers to start working on a way to mitigate unintentional arithmetic overflow, which has been a source of many bugs. This is not the first time Cook has made a request along these lines; he sent a related patch set in January 2024. Several core developers objected to the plan for different reasons. After receiving their feedback, Cook modified his approach to tackle the problem in a series of smaller steps.
Security updates for Monday
Serious vulnerability fixed with OpenSSH 9.8
Successful exploitation has been demonstrated on 32-bit Linux/glibc systems with ASLR. Under lab conditions, the attack requires on average 6-8 hours of continuous connections up to the maximum the server will accept. Exploitation on 64-bit systems is believed to be possible but has not been demonstrated at this time. It's likely that these attacks will be improved upon.Exploitation on non-glibc systems is conceivable but has not been examined.
There is a configuration workaround for systems that cannot be updated, though it has its own problems. See this Qualys advisory for more details.
Kernel prepatch 6.10-rc6
This release continues to be fairly calm, and rc6 looks pretty small. It's also entirely just random small fixes spread all over, with no bigger pattern."
[$] FreeDOS turns 30
FreeDOS is an open-source operating system designed to be compatible with the now-defunct MS-DOS. Three decades have now passed since the FreeDOS project was first announced, and it is still alive and well with a small community of developers and users committed to running legacy DOS software, classic DOS games, and developing modern applications that extend its functionality well beyond the original MS-DOS. It may well be around in another 30 years.
FSF Europe condemns Apple's DMA noncompliance
The Free Software Foundation Europe has submitted a joint position to the European Commission (EC), claiming that Apple has failed to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). This is the law that requires Apple to support alternative application stores on the devices it makes.
Apple's unfair behaviour against Free Software highlights the critical need to monitor the implementation of the DMA. The FSFE collaborated with F-Droid, the AppFair project, and other interoperability experts to scrutinize Apple's DMA compliance, and it's impact on Free Software. Since then, we coordinated several expert workshops with stakeholders, discussed with regulators in FOSDEM, had official meetings with the EC's DMA team, and submitted a comprehensive position to the EC detailing several problematic elements in the Apple compliance that will harm the Free Software.
[$] Redox: An operating system in Rust
With the Rust-for-Linux project starting to gain some ground, it is worth looking at other operating systems that use Rust in their kernels. There are many attempts to use Rust for operating system development, but Redox may be the most complete. Redox is an MIT-licensed microkernel and corresponding user space, designed around concepts taken from Plan 9. While nowhere near being usable as a replacement for Linux, it already provides a graphical user interface and the ability to run many POSIX programs.
Security updates for Friday
Highlights from the FreeBSD Developer Summit
The FreeBSD Foundation has published a set of reports from the May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada. The topics include FreeBSD Core Team updates, FreeBSD 15 release planning, Integration with Rust, and OCI containers on FreeBSD:
Doug Rabson began by providing an overview of the current state of FreeBSD support for OCI containers, noting that while FreeBSD has long supported containers through its jail and vnet features, the ecosystem around OCI containers requires further development. "FreeBSD has been able to do containers for a long time, but we need to align better with OCI standards to make our containers more compatible and easier to use," Rabson remarked.