LWN.net
Some weekend stable kernel updates
SourceHut outage post-mortem
SourceHut has published a post-mortem of its outage earlier this month. The post-mortem covers the causes of the outage and what steps SourceHut took to mitigate it, ending by saying:
As unfortunate as these events were, we welcome opportunities to stress-test our emergency procedures; we found them to be compatible with our objectives for the alpha and we learned a lot of ways to improve our reliability further for the future. We are going to continue working on our post-incident tasks, building up our infrastructure’s resilience, reliability, and scalability as planned. Once we address the high-priority tasks, though, our first order of business in the immediate future will be to get some rest.[$] Jujutsu: a new, Git-compatible version control system
Dave Mills RIP
More information about Mills can be found on his Wikipedia page.
[$] mseal() gets closer
Clarifying Misunderstandings of Slowroll (openSUSE News)
The idea behind Slowroll is to offer a distribution that improves stability without losing access to new features in the base packages such as the kernel, desktop environments and packaging. These slower update cycles allow for more extensive testing and validation of packages before their inclusion. Think of Slowroll as more of a skip than a Leap.
Security updates for Friday
Villa: Will the new judicial ruling in the Vizio lawsuit strengthen the GPL?
In some sense, not much has changed: if you were obligated to comply with the GPL two weeks ago, you have the same obligations today. If you didn’t have obligations then, you don’t have them now.
What has changed is who can enforce those obligations. Two weeks ago, we mostly believed that enforcement could only come from the authors of the code. Those folks rarely had time, money, or interest for litigation, and they might also face a lot of pressure from their peers and employers to avoid litigation.
If this ruling holds up at the end of the case, the number of potential enforcers just went way up.
[$] Improved code generation in the CPython JIT
Ken Jin from the Faster CPython project has been working on taking Python's recently-added just-in-time (JIT) compiler further by adding support for a peephole optimizer that rewrites the JIT's intermediate representation to introduce constant folding, type specialization, and other optimizations. Those techniques should provide significant benefits for the performance of many different types of code running on CPython.
Security updates for Thursday
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 18, 2024
[$] Growing pains for typing in Python
Please welcome Daroc Alden
We are pleased to announce that Daroc Alden has just joined LWN's staff. Daroc is a programmer from New England, where they live with their spouse and their cat. They graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire. In their spare time, they enjoy fiction writing and musicals. They are especially interested in programming language theory and implementation.
Daroc will be taking on some of the load of keeping LWN interesting while helping us to expand our content mix in the areas that our readers are interested in. Please give them your support as they come up to speed within our operation. We are looking forward to having Daroc as part of a reinforced and more energetic LWN going forward.
Kicinski: netdev in 2023
Throughout those releases netdev patch handlers (DaveM, Jakub, Paolo) applied 7243 patches, and the resulting pull requests to Linus described the changes in 6398 words. Given the volume of work we cannot go over every improvement, or even cover networking sub-trees in much detail (BPF enhancements… wireless work on WiFi 7…). We instead try to focus on major themes, and developments we subjectively find interesting.
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] Julia v1.10: Performance, a new parser, and more
Wine 9.0 released
A glitch in the merge window
There's apparently about 100k people without power, and I doubt our neighborhood is the priority, so I expect to be without power for some time still. I hope I'm wrong, but a few years ago it took more than a week to restore power due to all the downed trees. It's hopefully nowhere near that, but..