One of your editor's long-time hobbies is photography; it is an activity that can be rewarding even with the lack of any particular talent — a useful attribute. Photography has changed greatly over the years; as a result, those hard-earned darkroom skills are of little use, and photo processing has become yet another software problem. This is a field that supports a lot of proprietary software, but there is also no shortage of free software available. The time has come to combine work and pleasure and catch up with the state of free software for photography, starting with the darktable raw photo editor.

Anybody who upgraded to the recent Rust 1.58.0 release will probably want to move on to Rust 1.58.1; among other things it contains a fix for a security vulnerability in the standard library. "We recommend all users to update their toolchain immediately and rebuild their programs with the updated compiler".

Security updates have been issued by Debian (aide, flatpak, kernel, libspf2, and usbview), Fedora (kernel, libreswan, nodejs, texlive-base, and wireshark), openSUSE (aide, cryptsetup, grafana, permissions, rust1.56, and stb), SUSE (aide, apache2, cryptsetup, grafana, permissions, rust1.56, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (aide, thunderbird, and usbview).

The kernel community is a busy place, so it is not even remotely possible to write full-length articles about everything that is going on. Other topics may be of interest, but not require a longer treatment. The answer is a collection of short topics covering developments that are on the radar; the selection this time around includes folios, the multi-generational LRU, and Rust in the kernel.

Four new stable kernels have been announced: 5.16.2, 5.15.16, 5.10.93, and 5.4.173. These contain a relatively small set of important fixes; users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (drupal7), Fedora (kernel, libreswan, nodejs, and wireshark), openSUSE (busybox, firefox, kernel, and python-numpy), Oracle (gegl, gegl04, httpd, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-container, and libreswan), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and libreswan), Slackware (wpa_supplicant), SUSE (busybox, firefox, htmldoc, kernel, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-operator-container, openstack-monasca-agent, spark, spark-kit, zookeeper, and python-numpy), and Ubuntu (curl, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.11, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.11, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.11, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oem-5.10, linux-oem-5.13, linux-oem-5.14, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.11, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, openvswitch, and qtsvg-opensource-src).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 20, 2022 is available.

The Linux framebuffer device (fbdev) subsystem has long languished in something of a purgatory; it was listed as "orphaned" in the MAINTAINERS file and saw fairly minimal maintenance, mostly driven by developers working elsewhere in the kernel graphics stack. That all changed, in an eye-opening way, on January 17, when Linus Torvalds merged a change to make Helge Deller the new maintainer of the subsystem. But it turns out that the problems in fbdev run deep, at least according to much of the rest of the kernel graphics community. By seeming to take on the maintainer role in order to revert the removal of some buggy features from fbdev, Deller has created something of a controversy.

Version 7.0 of the ONLYOFFICE office suite is available.

With the release of Docs v7.0, ONLYOFFICE opens the source code of the professional editing features, such as document comparison, content controls and sheet views for spreadsheets, and makes them available in all solutions. Previously, all these features were exclusively accessible on a paying basis.

There is a long list of new features; see the announcement for details.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, gegl, kernel, and thunderbird), Debian (nvidia-graphics-drivers), Fedora (btrbk and thefuck), Mageia (clamav, kernel, kernel-linus, vim, and wpa_supplicant), openSUSE (java-1_8_0-ibm, jawn, nodejs12, nodejs14, SDL2, and virglrenderer), Red Hat (gegl, gegl04, java-17-openjdk, and kernel-rt), Scientific Linux (gegl and httpd), SUSE (apache2, firefox, java-1_7_1-ibm, java-1_8_0-ibm, libvirt, nodejs12, nodejs14, openstack-monasca-agent, spark, spark-kit, zookeeper, python-Django, python-Django1, python-numpy, SDL2, and virglrenderer), and Ubuntu (byobu, clamav, and ruby2.3, ruby2.5, ruby2.7).

A Python "frozenset" is simply a set object that is immutable—the objects it contains are determined at initialization time and cannot be changed thereafter. Like sets, frozensets are built into the language, but unlike most of the other standard Python types, there is no way to create a literal frozenset object. Changing that, by providing a mechanism to do so, was the topic of a recent discussion on the python-ideas mailing list.

January 22, 2022 will be the 24th anniversary of the publication of the first LWN.net Weekly Edition. A lot has happened in the intervening years; the Linux community has grown immeasurably, and LWN has grown with it. Later this year will also be the 20th anniversary of the adoption of our subscription-based model, which has sustained LWN ever since. There is a change coming for our subscribers that will, with luck, help to set up LWN to thrive in the coming years.

Version 7.0 of the WINE Windows API library has been released.

This release represents a year of development effort and over 9,100 individual changes. [...] The areas of major changes are:

• Most modules converted to PE format.
• Better theming support, with a bundled theme for a more modern look.
• Vastly improved HID stack and joystick support.
• New WoW64 architecture.

The Open Invention Network has announced an expansion of its "Linux System Definition", which is the set of software covered by its patent-protection umbrella.

Software packages, or components, being added to the Linux System include .Net, ONNX, tvm, Prometheus, Helm, Notary, Istio, Nix, OpenEmbedded, CoreOS, uClibc-ng, mbed-tls, musl, SPDX, AGL Services, OVN, FuseSoc, Verilator, Flutter, Jasmine, Weex, NodeRED, Eclipse Paho, Californium, Cyclone and Wakaama, among others. The expansion includes 337 new software components, bringing the total number of protected packages to 3,730.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (slurm-llnl), openSUSE (apache2, ghostscript, and watchman), Red Hat (kernel and telnet), SUSE (apache2, ghostscript, and kernel), and Ubuntu (clamav).

Once again, the COVID pandemic has forced linux.conf.au to go virtual, thus depriving your editor of a couple of 24-hour, economy-class, middle-seat experiences. This naturally leads to a set of mixed feelings. LCA has always put a priority on interesting keynote talks, and that has carried over into the online event; the opening keynote for LCA 2022 was given by Brian Kernighan. Despite being seen as a founder of our community, Kernighan is rarely seen at Linux events; he used his LCA keynote to reminisce for a while on where Unix came from and what its legacy is.

Version 5.0 of the FFmpeg audio and video toolkit has been released.

For this long-overdue release, a major effort underwent to remove the old encode/decode APIs and replace them with an N:M-based API, the entire libavresample library was removed, libswscale has a new, easier to use AVframe-based API, the Vulkan code was much improved, many new filters were added, including libplacebo integration, and finally, DoVi support was added, including tonemapping and remuxing. The default AAC encoder settings were also changed to improve quality.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.16.1, 5.15.15, 5.10.92, and 5.4.172 stable kernels. They contain a relatively small set of important fixes; users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, ghostscript, libreswan, prosody, sphinxsearch, thunderbird, and uriparser), Fedora (cryptsetup, flatpak, kernel, mingw-uriparser, python-celery, python-kombu, and uriparser), Mageia (htmldoc, mbedtls, openexr, perl-CPAN, systemd, thunderbird, and vim), openSUSE (chromium and prosody), Red Hat (httpd, kernel, and samba), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (expat), SUSE (ghostscript), and Ubuntu (pillow).

The ongoing memory folio work has caused ripples through much of the kernel and inspired a few side projects, one of which was the removal of slab-specific fields from struct page. That work has been pulled into the mainline for the 5.17 kernel release; it is thus a good time to catch up with the status of struct slab and why this work is important.