Vue lecture
[$] A plan to make BPF kfuncs polymorphic
David Vernet kicked off the BPF track at 2024's BPF track at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit with a talk about polymorphic kfuncs — or, with less jargon, kernel functions that can be called from BPF which use different implementations depending on context. He explained how this would be useful to the sched_ext BPF scheduling framework, but expected it to be helpful in other areas as well.
[$] 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.
[$] The first half of the 6.10 merge window
Neovim 0.10 released
Version 0.10 of the Vim-based text editor Neovim is now available. This release includes a new default color scheme, enhanced support for rendering multibyte characters, support for hyperlinks, system clipboard synchronization, and more. Many features have been deprecated in 0.10 and will be removed in future release. Neovim core contributor Gregory Anders has written a summary of some of the highlights and thoughts on upcoming releases:
We follow a "fun driven development" paradigm: for the most part, contributors and maintainers work on things that are personally interesting to them. Because of this, it can be difficult to predict what will happen in future releases. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, the best way to do it is to take a crack at it yourself: many of the features mentioned in this very blog post were contributed by users that are not part of the "core" maintenance team!
Security updates for Thursday
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 16, 2024
Mozilla Foundation Welcomes Nabiha Syed as Executive Director
Syed is known for her mission-driven leadership, focused on increasing transparency into the most powerful institutions in society. She comes to Mozilla after leading The Markup, an award-winning publication that challenges technology to serve the public good, from its launch through its successful acquisition in 2024.
Linux maintainers were infected for 2 years by SSH-dwelling backdoor (ars technica)
In 2014, ESET researchers said the 2011 attack likely infected kernel.org servers with a second piece of malware they called Ebury. The malware, the firm said, came in the form of a malicious code library that, when installed, created a backdoor in OpenSSH that provided the attackers with a remote root shell on infected hosts with no valid password required. In a little less than 22 months, starting in August 2011, Ebury spread to 25,000 servers. Besides the four belonging to the Linux Kernel Organization, the infection also touched one or more servers inside hosting facilities and an unnamed domain registrar and web hosting provider.
Firefox 126.0 released
Telemetry was added to create an aggregate count of searches by category to broadly inform search feature development."