Version 1.64.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the stabilization of the IntoFuture trait, easier access to C-compatible types, the availability of rust-analyzer via rustup, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (e17, fish, mako, and tinygltf), Fedora (mingw-poppler), Mageia (firefox, google-gson, libxslt, open-vm-tools, redis, and sofia-sip), Oracle (dbus-broker, kernel, kernel-container, mysql, and nodejs and nodejs-nodemon), Slackware (bind), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi-controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi-uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, containerized-data-importer, go1.18, go1.19, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools-container, virt-operator-container, libconfuse0, and oniguruma), and Ubuntu (bind9 and pcre2).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 22, 2022 is available.

Public hosting systems for free software have come and gone over the years but one of them, Sourceware, has been supporting the development of most of the GNU toolchain for nearly 25 years. Recently, an application was made to bring Sourceware under the umbrella of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), at least for fundraising purposes. It turns out that there is a separate initiative, developed in secret until now, with a different vision for the future of Sourceware. The 2022 GNU Tools Cauldron was the site of an intense discussion on how this important community resource should be managed in the coming years.

Version 43 of the GNOME desktop environment has been released; see the release notes for details.

This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.

Konstantin Ryabitsev has announced the availability of rendered documentation from linux-next on kernel.org. This will be useful for anybody wanting to see what the documentation for the next kernel release will look like.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (libconfuse, moodle, rizin, and thunderbird), Oracle (ELS kernel, gnupg2, ruby, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (booth, dbus-broker, gnupg2, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, mysql, nodejs, nodejs-nodemon, ruby, and webkit2gtk3), Slackware (expat and mozilla), SUSE (kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools-container, virt-operator-container and vsftpd), and Ubuntu (bind9, ghostscript, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, lnux-hwe, inux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, and mako).

The Debian project has begun voting on changes to its approach to firmware needed to install a working distribution. The original ballot options described in this article are still there, but this is Debian so there are several others as well. Some of the additions include changes to the Debian Social Contract that explicitly allow the shipping of firmware needed to use Debian on hardware requiring that firmware.

The traditional mechanism for launching a program in a new process on Unix systems—forking and execing—has been with us for decades, but it is not really the most efficient of operations. Various alternatives have been tried along the way but have not supplanted the traditional approach. A new mechanism created by Josh Triplett adds process creation to the io_uring asynchronous I/O API and shows great promise; he came to the 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) to introduce io_uring_spawn.

The 5.19.10, 5.15.69, 5.10.144, 5.4.214, 4.19.259, 4.14.294, and 4.9.329 stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (dokuwiki and rizin), SUSE (libcontainers-common, permissions, sqlite3, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (tiff, vim, and xen).

After a two-year hiatus, the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit returned to an in-person format in Dublin, Ireland on September 15. Around 30 kernel developers discussed a number of process-related issues relating to the kernel community. LWN had the privilege of being there and is able, once again, to report from the event. This years sessions included discussions of regression handling, the imminent merging of Rust support, BPF, the kernel development process, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (connman and e17), Fedora (curl, open-vm-tools, pcs, and python-lxml), Mageia (curl, dpkg, freecad, gimp, libtar, libtiff, mediawiki, ostree, python-lxml, schroot, SDL12, sdl2, wireshark, and zlib), Oracle (kernel and php:7.4), Red Hat (php:7.4), Slackware (vim), SUSE (chromium, kernel, libarchive, libtirpc, mupdf, python-rsa, ruby2.5, and virtualbox), and Ubuntu (linux-intel-iotg).

The artemis.sh blog has a detailed review of the state of Wayland compared to X.org.

It feels fantastic. It even made my software cursor not feel so softwarey, which I’ve never experienced with a software cursor before. I have a pretty bad GPU, but on a higher end card you’d get a huge benefit to this in games. If your card can render the game many times faster than your monitor refresh rate, you can unlock your FPS in the game, tune your max_render_time to the absolute minimum, and get EXTREMELY low latency while still having absolutely no screen tearing whatsoever.

And like, this is the first time I’ve ever seen the vsync setting in a game actually sync the game up with the vblank interval in a way that matters. It works for games in wine. It’s amazing. I have never experienced gaming on Linux that looked this smooth in my life.

The 6.0-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

So this is an artificially small -rc release, because this past week we had the Maintainers' Summit in Dublin (along with OSS EU and LPC 2022), so we've had a lot of maintainers traveling.

Or - putting my ridiculously optimistic hat on - maybe things are just so nice and stable that there just weren't all that many fixes?

Nobody should need more memory than a 64-bit pointer can address — or so developers tend to think. The range covered by a pointer of that size seems to be nearly infinite. During the Kernel Summit track at the 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference, Matthew Wilcox took the stage to make the point that 64 bits may turn out to be too few — and sooner than we think. It is not too early to start planning for 128-bit Linux systems, which he termed "ZettaLinux", and we don't want to find ourselves wishing we'd started sooner.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (bzip2, chromium, glib2.0, libraw, mariadb-10.3, and mod-wsgi), Fedora (kdiskmark, wordpress, and zlib), Oracle (.NET 6.0, .NET Core 3.1, mariadb:10.3, nodejs:14, nodejs:16, ruby:2.7, and ruby:3.0), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, php:7.4, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (389-ds, flatpak, kernel, libgit2, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (sqlite3, vim, and wayland).

Parts of the Rust language may look familiar to C programmers, but the two languages differ in fundamental ways. One difference that turns out to be problematic for kernel programming is the stability of data in memory — or the lack thereof. A challenging session at the 2022 Kangrejos conference wrestled with ways to deal with objects that should not be moved behind the programmer's back.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.19.9, 5.15.68, 5.10.143, 5.4.213, 4.19.258, 4.14.293, and 4.9.328 stable kernels. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users of those series should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (nova, pcs, and rails), Fedora (firejail, moby-engine, and pspp), Oracle (.NET 6.0, gnupg2, kernel, python3, and rsyslog rsyslog7), Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and .NET Core 3.1), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, poppler, and webkit2gtk).