It would appear that the ipmitool repository has been locked, and its maintainer suspended, by GitHub. This Hacker News conversation delves into the reason; evidently the developer was employed by a sanctioned Russian company. Ipmitool remains available and will, presumably, find a new home eventually. (Thanks to Paul Wise).

Writing applications for devices with a lot of resource constraints, such as a small amount of RAM or no memory-management unit (MMU), poses some challenges. Running a Linux distribution often isn't an option on these devices, but there are operating systems that try to bridge the gap between running a Linux distribution and using bare-metal development. One of these is Zephyr, a real-time operating system (RTOS) launched by the Linux Foundation in 2016. LWN looked in on Zephyr at its four-year anniversary as well. Seven years after its announcement, Zephyr has made lots of progress and now has an active ecosystem surrounding it.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (redis), Fedora (cairo, freetype, harfbuzz, and qt6-qtwebengine), Red Hat (kpatch-patch), SUSE (chromium, java-1_8_0-openj9, and nodejs18), and Ubuntu (chromium-browser, libxstream-java, php-twig, twig, protobuf, and python-werkzeug).

Version 2.40.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. Changes include a new --merge-base option for merges, a built-in implementation of bisection, Emacs support for git jump, a fair number of smallish user-interface tweaks, and a lot of bug fixes. See the announcement and this GitHub blog entry for the details.

The kernel's software-interrupt ("softirq") mechanism was added prior to the 1.0 kernel release, but it implements a design seen in systems that were already old when Linux was born. For much of that time, softirqs have been an impediment to the kernel community's scalability and response-time goals, but they have proved resistant to removal. A recent discussion on a proposed new heuristic to mitigate a softirq-related performance problem may have reinvigorated interest in doing something about this subsystem as a whole rather than just tweaking the parameters of how it operates.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.2.6, 6.1.19, 5.15.102, 5.10.174, 5.4.236, 4.19.277, and 4.14.309 stable kernels. These contain a small number of fixes, including a partial reversion that fixes WiFi problems that were introduced recently.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, mpv, rails, and ruby-sidekiq), Fedora (chromium, dcmtk, and strongswan), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, dcmtk, kernel, kernel-linus, libreswan, microcode, redis, and tmux), SUSE (postgresql14 and python39), and Ubuntu (linux-kvm, linux-raspi-5.4, and thunderbird).

The 6.3-rc2 kernel prepatch is out.

This one looks fairly normal, although if you look at the diffs, they are dominated by the removal of a staging driver (r8188eu) that has been superceded by a proper driver. That removal itself is 90% of the diffs. But if you filter that out, it all looks normal

The 6.2.4 and 6.1.17 stable kernels have been released; each contains a pair of reverts for problematic patches in yesterday's updates. But it doesn't stop there; also released are 6.2.5, 6.1.18, and 5.15.100 with another set of important fixes.

Update: they keep on coming: the large 5.10.173, 5.4.235, 4.19.276, and 4.14.308 kernels have been released, as has the single-revert 5.15.101 update

The sustainability of free software continues to be mostly uncharted waters. No team is the same as any other, so copying, say, the Blender Foundation’s approach to governance will, most likely, not work for other projects. But there is value in understanding how various non-commercial organizations operate in order to make informed decisions for the governance of new ones. In late 2021, the FreeCAD team launched the FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) to handle the various assets that belong to this free 3D CAD project. In this interview, Yorik van Havre, a longtime FreeCAD developer — and current president of the Association — guides us through the process of starting and managing the FPA.

The 6.2.3, 6.1.16, and 5.15.99 stable kernel updates have been released. The first updates after the close of a merge window tend to be huge, and these ones certainly fit that description.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and wireless-regdb), Fedora (caddy, python-cryptography, and redis), Oracle (gnutls), SUSE (hdf5, opera, python-Django, redis, tomcat, and xen), and Ubuntu (apache2 and snakeyaml).

The kernel's completely fair scheduler (CFS) has the job of managing the allocation of CPU time for most of the processes running on most Linux systems. CFS was merged for the 2.6.23 release in 2007 and has, with numerous ongoing tweaks, handled the job reasonably well ever since. CFS is not perfect, though, and there are some situations it does not handle as well as it should. The EEVDF scheduler, posted by Peter Zijlstra, offers the possibility of improving on CFS while reducing its dependence on often-fragile heuristics.

Version 1.68.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the stabilization of the "sparse" Cargo protocol, the ability for (some) applications to recover from memory-allocation failures, and "local Pin construction":

The new pin! macro constructs a Pin<&mut T> from a T expression, anonymously captured in local state. This is often called stack-pinning, but that "stack" could also be the captured state of an async fn or block.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel, pesign, samba, and zlib), Oracle (kernel), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (emacs, libxslt, nodejs12, nodejs14, nodejs16, openssl, poppler, python-py, python-wheel, xen, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, opusfile, and samba).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for March 9, 2023 is available.

Way back in 2009, we looked at the presto plugin for yum, which added support for DeltaRPMs to Fedora. That package format allows just the binary differences (i.e. the delta) between an installed RPM and its update to be transmitted, which saves network bandwidth; the receiving system then creates the new RPM from those two pieces before installing it. Support for DeltaRPMs was eventually added to the distribution by default, though the feature has never really lived up to expectations—and hopes. Now, it would seem that Fedora is ready to, in the words of project leader Matthew Miller, "give DeltaRPMs a sad, fond farewell".

Version 4.18 of the Samba interoperability suite is out. Changes include some significant performance improvements, better error messages, and more; click below for the details.

Version 4.15 of the "anything to PostScript" filter a2ps has been released — the first release since 2007. "This release contains few user-visible changes. It does however contain a lot of changes “under the hood”: code clean-up, etc. Therefore, it’s likely that there are new bugs."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (apr), Fedora (c-ares), Oracle (curl, kernel, pesign, samba, and zlib), Red Hat (curl, gnutls, kernel, kernel-rt, and pesign), Scientific Linux (kernel, pesign, samba, and zlib), SUSE (libX11, python-rsa, python3, python36, qemu, rubygem-rack, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (libtpms, linux-ibm, linux-raspi, linux-raspi, python3.7, python3.8, and sofia-sip).