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WELCOME TO LWN.NET

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[$] LWN.NET WEEKLY EDITION FOR NOVEMBER 7, 2024

Posted Nov 7, 2024 2:57 UTC (Thu)

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 7, 2024 is available.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

 * Front: Secure NixOS images; OpenWrt One; Safety in an unsafe world; Overture;
   OSI board AMA.
 * Briefs: BPF RFC; LXQt 2.1.0; Man-page funding; Rust goals; Quotes; ...
 * Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Read more




[$] BUILDING SECURE IMAGES WITH NIXOS

[Distributions] Posted Nov 6, 2024 16:35 UTC (Wed) by daroc



Image-based Linux distributions have seen increasing popularity, recently. They
promise reliability and security, but pose packaging problems for existing
distributions. Ryan Lahfa and Niklas Sturm spoke about the work that NixOS has
done to enable an image-based workflow at this year's All Systems Go! conference
in Berlin. Unfortunately, LWN was not able to cover the conference for
scheduling reasons, but the videos of the event are available for anyone
interested in watching the talks. Lahfa and Sturm explained that it is currently
possible to create a NixOS system that cryptographically verifies the kernel,
initrd, and Nix store on boot — although doing so still has some rough edges.
Making an image-based NixOS installation is similarly possible.

Full Story (comments: 7)




[$] SAFETY IN AN UNSAFE WORLD

[Development] Posted Nov 5, 2024 15:16 UTC (Tue) by daroc



Joshua Liebow-Feeser took to the stage at RustConf to describe the methodology
that his team uses to encode arbitrary constraints in the Rust type system when
working on the Fuchsia operating system (slides). The technique is not unknown
to the Rust community, but Liebow-Feeser did a good job of both explaining the
method and making a case for why it should be used more widely.

Full Story (comments: 34)




[$] THE OPENWRT ONE SYSTEM

[Front] Posted Nov 4, 2024 16:04 UTC (Mon) by corbet

OpenWrt is, despite its relatively low profile, one of our community's most
important distributions; it runs untold numbers of network routers and has
served as the base on which a lot of network-oriented development (including the
bufferbloat-reduction work) has been done. At the beginning of 2024, a few
members of the project announced a plan to design and produce a router device
specifically designed to run OpenWrt. This device, dubbed the "OpenWrt One", is
now becoming available; the kind folks at the Software Freedom Conservancy were
kind enough to ship one to LWN, where the desire to play with a new toy is never
lacking.

Full Story (comments: 34)




[$] OSI BOARD AMA AT ALL THINGS OPEN

[Front] Posted Nov 1, 2024 17:14 UTC (Fri) by jzb



Members of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board sat down for a 45-minute "Ask
Me Anything" (AMA) session at All Things Open in Raleigh, NC on October 29.
Though the floor was open to any topic the audience might want to ask of the OSI
board, many of the questions were focused on the Open Source AI Definition
(OSAID), which was announced the day before. The new definition has been
somewhat controversial, and the board spent a lot of time addressing concerns
about it during the session, as well as questions on open washing, and a need
for more education about open source in general.

Full Story (comments: 32)




[$] THE OVERTURE OPEN-MAPPING PROJECT

[Development] Posted Oct 31, 2024 16:48 UTC (Thu) by corbet

OpenStreetMap tends to dominate the space for open mapping data, but it is not
the only project working in this area. At the 2024 Open Source Summit Japan,
Marc Prioleau presented the Overture Maps Foundation, which is building and
distributing a set of worldwide maps under open licenses. Overture may have a
similar goal to OpenStreetMap, but its approach and intended uses are
significantly different.

Full Story (comments: 20)




LWN.NET WEEKLY EDITION FOR OCTOBER 31, 2024

Posted Oct 31, 2024 0:42 UTC (Thu)

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 31, 2024 is available.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

 * Front: Open AI definition; M1/M2 GPU drivers; Rust compiler; realloc(0);
   BOLT; AutoFDO and Propeller; Test-suite validation.
 * Briefs: CUPS vulnerability; Fedora 41; Firefox 132.0; Flock; OSAID 1.0;
   Thunderbird for Android; Quotes; ...
 * Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Read more




AN UPDATE ON APPLE M1/M2 GPU DRIVERS

[Development] Posted Oct 30, 2024 16:23 UTC (Wed) by jake

The kernel graphics driver for the Apple M1 and M2 GPUs is, rather famously,
written in Rust, but it has achieved conformance with various graphics
standards, which is also noteworthy. At the X.Org Developers Conference
(XDC) 2024, Alyssa Rosenzweig gave an update on the status of the driver, along
with some news about the kinds of games it can support (YouTube video, slides).
There has been lots of progress since her talk at XDC last year (YouTube video),
with, of course, still more to come.

Full Story (comments: 16)




A NEW APPROACH TO VALIDATING TEST SUITES

[Development] Posted Oct 29, 2024 17:01 UTC (Tue) by daroc



The first program that Martin Pool ever wrote, he said, had bugs; the ones he's
writing now most likely have bugs too. The talk Pool gave at RustConf this year
was about a way to try to write programs with fewer bugs. He has developed a
tool called cargo-mutants that highlights gaps in test coverage by identifying
functions that can be broken without causing any tests to fail. This can be a
valuable complement to other testing techniques, he explained.

Full Story (comments: 21)




THE PERFORMANCE OF THE RUST COMPILER

[Development] Posted Oct 28, 2024 16:10 UTC (Mon) by daroc



Sparrow Li presented virtually at RustConf 2024 about the current state of and
future plans for the Rust compiler's performance. The compiler is relatively
slow to compile large programs, although it has been getting better over time.
The next big performance improvement to come will be parallelizing the
compiler's parsing, type-checking, and related operations, but even after that,
the project has several avenues left to explore.

Full Story (comments: 22)




FUNDING RESTORED FOR MAN-PAGE MAINTENANCE

[Kernel] Posted Nov 6, 2024 15:48 UTC (Wed) by corbet

Man pages maintainer Alejandro Colomar announced in September that he was
suspending his work due to a lack of support. He has now let it be known that
funding has been found for the next year at least:



> We've been talking for a couple of months, and we have already agreed to sign
> a contract through the LF [Linux Foundation], where a number of companies
> provide the funds for the contract. The contract will cover the next 12 months
> for the agreed amount, and we should sign it in the following days. Since I've
> already seen a draft of the contract, and it looks good, I've already started
> maintaining the project again, starting on Nov 1st.

Comments (4 posted)




SECURITY UPDATES FOR WEDNESDAY

[Security] Posted Nov 6, 2024 14:13 UTC (Wed) by jzb

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libtiff), Debian (context,
libheif, and thunderbird), Fedora (php-tcpdf, syncthing, and thunderbird),
Gentoo (EditorConfig core C library, Flatpak, Neat VNC, and Ubiquiti UniFi),
Oracle (bcc, bpftrace, grafana-pcp, haproxy, kernel, krb5, libtiff,
python-gevent, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12-urllib3, and xmlrpc-c), Red Hat
(python3.11-urllib3), SUSE (audacity, curl, govulncheck-vulndb, gradle, htmldoc,
libgsf, python310, and qbittorrent), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-5.4,
linux-oracle-5.4, mpg123, and python-werkzeug).

Full Story (comments: none)




LXQT 2.1.0 RELEASED

[Development] Posted Nov 5, 2024 15:17 UTC (Tue) by jzb



Version 2.1.0 of the LXQt lightweight Qt desktop environment has been released.
The highlight of this release is support for multiple Wayland compositors:

> Through its new component lxqt-wayland-session, LXQt 2.1.0 supports 7 Wayland
> sessions (with Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri), has two
> Wayland back-ends in lxqt-panel (one for kwin_wayland and the other general),
> and will add more later. All LXQt components that are not limited to X11 —
> i.e., most components — work fine on Wayland. [...]
> 
> Of course, the X11 session will be supported indefinitely. Wayland is optional
> and rather experimental.

Comments (none posted)




THE BPF INSTRUCTION SET ARCHITECTURE IS NOW RFC 9669

[Kernel] Posted Nov 5, 2024 14:43 UTC (Tue) by corbet

After a couple of years of effort, the BPF instruction set architecture has been
accepted as RFC 9669, giving it a standard outside of the in-kernel
implementation. This message from David Vernet (who also contributed an article
on the standardization process last year) describes the process and why it is
important:



> Though some vendors have already implemented BPF offloading capabilities
> without having a standardized ISA, others are not quite as risk tolerant. As
> Christoph [Hellwig] discussed at LSFMM 2022, certain NVMe vendors have
> expressed an interest in building BPF offloading capabilities for various use
> cases such as eXpress Resubmission Path (XRP), but they simply can't fund such
> a project without certain components of BPF being standardized. Hence, the
> effort to standardize BPF was born.

Comments (5 posted)




SECURITY UPDATES FOR TUESDAY

[Security] Posted Nov 5, 2024 14:42 UTC (Tue) by corbet

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, openexr, and
thunderbird), Fedora (llama-cpp and python-quart), Oracle (firefox, openexr,
thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (chromium,
govulncheck-vulndb, openssl-1_1, python311, and python312), and Ubuntu
(linux-azure, linux-bluefield, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, openjpeg2, and
ruby3.0, ruby3.2, ruby3.3).

Full Story (comments: none)




SECURITY UPDATES FOR MONDAY

[Security] Posted Nov 4, 2024 14:29 UTC (Mon) by jake

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, grafana, kernel, and
mod_http2), Debian (chromium, openssl, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, krb5,
mysql8.0, polkit, python-single-version, and webkitgtk), Mageia (bind, buildah,
podman, skopeo, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons. kmod-virtualbox, kernel-firmware &
kernel-firmware-nonfree radeon-firmware, and kernel-linus), SUSE (apache2,
chromedriver, cups-filters, docker-stable, firefox, gama, govulncheck-vulndb,
java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-23-openjdk, libnss_slurm2, openssl-1_1,
openssl-3, python-waitress, python3, python310-waitress, ruby2.5,
rubygem-actionmailer-5_1, rubygem-actionpack-5_1, rubygem-bundler, webkit2gtk3,
and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (linux-azure-6.8).

Full Story (comments: none)




KERNEL PREPATCH 6.12-RC6

[Kernel] Posted Nov 4, 2024 0:41 UTC (Mon) by corbet

The 6.12-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus says: "Another week,
another rc. Nothing odd or special seems to be going on - this may be a bit on
the bigger side for an rc6, but not hugely so, and nothing stands out."

Comments (none posted)




FOUR FRIDAY STABLE KERNEL UPDATES

[Kernel] Posted Nov 1, 2024 14:43 UTC (Fri) by daroc



Greg Kroah-Hartman has released another four stable Linux kernel updates:
6.11.6, 6.6.59, 6.1.115, and 5.15.170.

Comments (none posted)




SECURITY UPDATES FOR FRIDAY

[Security] Posted Nov 1, 2024 12:44 UTC (Fri) by daroc

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora
(xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Oracle (buildah, e2fsprogs, grafana, kernel, and
mod_http2), Red Hat (buildah, container-tools:rhel8, firefox, grafana,
grafana:7.3.6, podman, and thunderbird), SUSE (alloy,
cargo-audit-advisory-db-20241030, chromedriver, corepack22, netty, openvpn,
python310-Werkzeug, thunderbird, uwsgi, and xsd), and Ubuntu (linux,
linux-azure-6.8, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-hwe-6.8 and linux, linux-gcp,
linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4).

Full Story (comments: none)




OCTOBER PROJECT GOALS UPDATE (RUST BLOG)

[Development] Posted Oct 31, 2024 21:26 UTC (Thu) by jzb



The Rust blog has an update on its progress on some of its project goals. One of
the project's flagship goals is to resolve the biggest blockers to Linux
building on stable Rust:

> Finally, we have been finding an increasing number of stabilization requests
> at the compiler level, and so @wesleywiser and @davidtwco from the compiler
> team have started attending meetings to create a faster response. One of the
> results of that collaboration is RFC #3716, authored by Alice Ryhl, which
> proposes a method to manage compiler flags that modify the target ABI. Our
> previous approach has been to create distinct targets for each combination of
> flags, but the number of flags needed by the kernel make that impractical.
> Authoring the RFC revealed more such flags than previously recognized,
> including those that modify LLVM behavior.



Comments (none posted)



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