Security updates have been issued by Debian (file and thunderbird), Fedora (exercism, libtommath, moby-engine, and python-pyramid), Oracle (cups and kernel), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, and thunderbird), SUSE (amazon-ecs-init, buildah, busybox, djvulibre, exempi, firefox, gsl, keylime, kubernetes1.18, php7, and sccache), and Ubuntu (docker-registry and linux-azure-5.4).

The kernel-development community has recently been discussing a number of independent patches, each of which is intended to help improve the security of deployed systems in some way. They touch on a number of areas within the kernel, including the question of how widely io_uring should be available, how to allow virtual machines to attest to their integrity, and the best way to inform applications when their random-number generators need to be reseeded.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, kernel, kubernetes, and mediawiki), Mageia (openldap), SUSE (terraform), and Ubuntu (atftp, busybox, and thunderbird).

The 6.5.1, 6.4.14, 6.1.51, 5.15.130, 5.10.194, 5.4.256, 4.19.294, and 4.14.325 stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The pidfd API has been added to the kernel over the last several years to provide a race-free way for processes to refer to each other. While the GNU C Library (glibc) gained basic pidfd support with the 2.36 release in 2022, it still lacks a complete solution for race-free process creation. This patch set from Adhemerval Zanella seems likely to fill that gap in the near future, though, with an extension to the posix_spawn() API.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, firefox-esr, and gst-plugins-ugly1.0), Fedora (firefox, libeconf, libwebsockets, mosquitto, and rust-rustls-webpki), SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, open-vm-tools, and terraform-provider-helm), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-intel-iotg, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, and python-git).

As of this writing, 4,588 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 6.6 kernel release. The 6.6 merge window, in other words, is just getting started. Nonetheless, a fair amount of significant work has already been pulled, so the time has come to summarize what has happened so far in this development cycle.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, json-c, opendmarc, and otrs2), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-ibm and kpatch-patch), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (haproxy, php7, vim, and xen), and Ubuntu (elfutils, frr, and linux-gcp, linux-starfive).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 31, 2023 is available.

A series of rabbit holes, some of which led to unshaved yaks, recently landed me on a book called Mastering Emacs. Given that I have been using Emacs "professionally" for more than 16 years—and first looked into it a good ways into the previous century—I should probably be pretty well-versed in that editor-cum-operating-system. Sadly, for a variety of reasons, that is not really true, but the book and some concerted effort have been helping me down a path toward Emacs-ian enlightenment. Mastering Emacs may also help others who are struggling in the frothy sea that makes up Emacs documentation.

The 6.4.13, 6.1.50, 5.15.129, 5.10.193, 5.4.255, 4.19.293, and 4.14.324 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (qpdf, ring, and tryton-server), Fedora (mingw-qt5-qtbase and moby-engine), Red Hat (cups, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, librsvg2, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), and Ubuntu (amd64-microcode, firefox, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.2, linux-azure, linux-hwe-6.2, linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.2, linux-raspi, linux-bluefield, linux-ibm, linux-oem-6.1, and openjdk-lts, openjdk-17).

"Sugar" is, to a certain extent, in the eye of the beholder—at least when it comes to syntax. Programming languages are often made up of a (mostly) irreducible core, with lots of sugary constructs sprinkled on top—the syntactic sugar. No one wants to be forced to do without the extra syntax—at least not for their favorite pieces—but it is worth looking at how a language's constructs can be built from the core. That is just what Brett Cannon has been doing for Python, on his blog and in talks, including a talk at PyCon back in April (YouTube video).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (flask-security and opendmarc), Fedora (qemu), Oracle (rust and rust-toolset:ol8), Red Hat (cups and libxml2), Scientific Linux (cups), SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, chromium, clamav, freetype2, haproxy, nodejs12, procps, and vim), and Ubuntu (faad2, json-c, libqb, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.15, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, and linux-gke, linux-ibm-5.4).

The OpenChain site carries the sad news of the passing of Satoru Ueda. Your editor first met Ueda San at the 2007 Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, where a small group of dedicated developers and managers was working hard to bring open-source development practices to the country. Ueda San was always a strong advocate for this cause and deserves much credit for the success of Linux and open source in Japan. He was also always a warm and welcoming person; he will be much missed.

The 6.5 kernel was released on August 27 after a nine-week development cycle. By that time, some 13,561 non-merge changesets had found their way into the mainline repository, the lowest number seen since the 5.15 release (12,377 changesets) in late 2021. Nonetheless, quite a bit of significant work was done in this cycle; read on for a look at where that work came from.

August 26 was the 25th anniversary of the release of the Bugzilla bug tracker as open-source software under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). A blog post for the occasion has some announcements, including several upcoming releases, help wanted, and a new legal entity to house the project: Which now brings us to today, when I’m happy to announce the formation of Zarro Boogs Corporation, which will now be overseeing the Bugzilla Project. This is a taxable non-profit non-charitable corporation - we have filed with the IRS our intent to operate under US Tax Code §501(c)(4) (still pending approval from the IRS) meaning the IRS would require us to spend money raised on project expenses and not make a profit, but money donated to us will not earn you a tax deduction because we aren’t a charity (software development is not considered a charitable cause in the US). Unlike Thunderbird, which is a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, we are an independent entity not owned by or associated with the Mozilla Foundation, although they have licensed the use of the Bugzilla trademark to us.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, clamav, librsvg, rar, and unrar-nonfree), Fedora (caddy, chromium, and xen), and SUSE (ca-certificates-mozilla, gawk, ghostscript, java-1_8_0-ibm, java-1_8_0-openjdk, php7, qemu, and xen).

Linus has, as expected, released the 6.5 kernel.

I still have this nagging feeling that a lot of people are on vacation and that things have been quiet partly due to that. But this release has been going smoothly, so that's probably just me being paranoid. The biggest patches this last week were literally just to our selftests.

Headline features in 6.5 include faster booting on large x86 systems, Arm Permission Indirection Extension support, Rust 1.68.2 support, unaccepted memory handling, "mount beneath" support for filesystems, the cachestat() system call, the ability to pass a pidfd via a SCM_CREDENTIALS control message, scope-based resource management for internal kernel code, the deprecation of the SLAB allocator, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the (in-progress) KernelNewbies 6.5 page for details.

The 6.1.48, 5.15.128, and 5.10.192 stable kernels have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Update: 6.1.49 has also been released. "This upgrade is only for all users of the 6.1 series that use the x86 platform OR the F2FS file system. If that's not you, feel free to ignore this release."