As was recently reported here, the Fedora project has been considering dropping support for legacy BIOS systems in upcoming releases. The idea was controversial at best, and the minutes from the April 26 FESCo meeting show that it has been rejected, for now at least. The BIOS SIG will be asked for a new plan for BIOS support in Fedora.

Version 4.0 of the Yocto Project distribution builder is out. Changes include a move to the 5.15 kernel, reproducibility fixes, improved overlayfs support, numerous security updates, and a long list of new recipes.

The 5.17.5, 5.15.36, 5.10.113, 5.4.191, 4.19.240, 4.14.277, and 4.9.312 stable kernels have all been released, one day earlier than had originally been expected. As usual, each contains another set of important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Mageia (virtualbox), Red Hat (container-tools:2.0, container-tools:3.0, gzip, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, mariadb:10.3, mariadb:10.5, maven-shared-utils, polkit, vim, xmlrpc-c, and zlib), Scientific Linux (maven-shared-utils), SUSE (ant, go1.17, go1.18, kernel, and xen), and Ubuntu (fribidi, git, libcroco, libsepol, linux, linux-gcp, linux-ibm, linux-lowlatency, openjdk-17, and openjdk-lts).

Python's super() built-in function can be somewhat confusing, as highlighted by a huge python-ideas thread that we started looking at last week. It is used by methods in class hierarchies to access methods and attributes in a parent class, but exactly which class that super() resolves to is perhaps a bit unclear in multiple-inheritance hierarchies. The discussion in the second "half" of the thread further highlighted some lesser-known parts of the language.

Version 19 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution has been released.

With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 12’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s fairly large changes in Android 11, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 12 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features, as well as adapt our additions to Android 12’s new Material You design language!

Beyond the move to Android 12, this release includes improvements to a lot of apps, a new setup wizard, and more. Less happily, this release has had to leave a lot of older devices behind; a device must be able to run a 4.9 or newer kernel to be able to run LineageOS 19.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg), Fedora (htmldoc, moby-engine, plantuml, and zchunk), Oracle (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, and kernel), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), Slackware (freerdp), SUSE (kernel, mutt, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and xen), and Ubuntu (barbican and git).

The kernel gained support for the TLS protocol in the 4.13 release, which came out in September 2017. That support is incomplete, though, in that it does not provide the kernel with a way to initiate a TLS connection on its own. Instead, user space creates a socket and performs the TLS handshake before handing the socket to the kernel, which can then transfer data using TLS. The situation may be about to change as a result of this patch series from Chuck Lever — though user space will still need to remain in the picture.

Dave Täht has put together a summary of the state of fair queuing and the fight against bufferbloat in general.

On a very positive note, while it might seem the negatives are overwhelming in the list above, I’m confident that there are billions of devices for which fq_codel is doing a good job. I’m confident there is a rising tide of clued system administrators and users applying smart queue management in the right places at the right times. There’s more than enough products on the market already that have the right stuff in them to make better networks a matter of merely recognising the problem and applying the fix.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, libinput, podman-tui, and vim), Mageia (git, gzip/xz, libdxfrw, libinput, librecad, and openscad), and SUSE (dnsmasq, git, libinput, libslirp, libxml2, netty, podofo, SDL, SDL2, and tomcat).

The 5.18-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Fairly slow and calm week - which makes me just suspect that the other shoe will drop at some point. But maybe things are just going really well this release. It's bound to happen _occasionally_, after all."

Subsystem maintainers routinely use git request-pull as part of the process of sending work upstream. Normally, the result includes a list of commits included in the request and a nice diffstat that shows which files will be touched and how much of each will be changed; examples abound on the kernel mailing lists. Occasionally, though, a repository with a relatively complicated development history will yield a massive diffstat containing a great deal of unrelated work. The result looks ugly and obscures what the pull request is actually doing. This document describes what is happening and how to fix things up; it is derived from The Wisdom of Linus Torvalds, which has been posted numerous times over the years (example 1, example 2).

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (composer, golang-x-crypto, rubygem-nokogiri, wavpack, xen, and xz) and SUSE (dnsmasq, openjpeg, swtpm, tomcat, and xen).

OpenBSD 7.1 has been released. The list of changes and new features is long, as usual; see the full text, below, for all the details.

The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, codenamed "Jammy Jellyfish", is now available. It comes in several editions (Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core) and multiple flavors (Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, UbuntuStudio, and Xubuntu). Lots more information can be found in the release notes. Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 LTS gains significant usability, battery and performance improvements with GNOME 42. It features GNOME power profiles and streamlined workspace transitions alongside significant optimisations which can double the desktop frame rate on Intel and Raspberry Pi graphics drivers.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the first LTS release where the entire recent Raspberry Pi device portfolio is supported, from the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to the Raspberry Pi 4. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS adds Rust for memory-safe systems-level programming. It also moves to OpenSSL v3, with new cryptographic algorithms for elevated security.

The Debian project leader election has completed and Jonathan Carter has been reelected for his third term. For more information, see the Debian vote page. We looked at the candidates back in March.

The world of music and audio production is largely dominated by proprietary software vendors. Among them, Steinberg stands out as a company that created some of the most-used software, including the Cubase and Nuendo digital audio workstations. Steinberg is also known as the creator of the VST plugin API that, largely due to its licensing policy, has irritated developers enough to inspire multiple attempts at creating an open-source alternative. Even now, when the VST3 SDK is available under the GPLv3 license, the way the company exercises its control over the SDK keeps pushing developers away toward other open-source solutions.

This is an introduction to open-source plugin APIs for musicians and sound engineers alike. It focuses on the options in the larger ecosystem and how their shortcomings led to the creation of new alternatives with liberal licensing.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (frr, grafana, gzip, and pdns), Oracle (java-11-openjdk), Red Hat (java-11-openjdk and kernel), Scientific Linux (java-11-openjdk), SUSE (dcraw, GraphicsMagick, gzip, kernel, nbd, netty, qemu, SDL, and xen), and Ubuntu (libinput, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.13, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.13, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.13, linux-hwe-5.13, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.13, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, inux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-azure-fde, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and linux-oem-5.14).

The OpenWrt 21.02.3 and 19.07.10 updates have been released. These updates contain some security fixes and improved device support. It's noting that this is the last 19.07 update:

OpenWrt 19.07.10 is the final release of the 19.07 release branch, this branch is now end of life and we will not fix problems on this branch any more, not even severe security problems. We encourage all users still using OpenWrt 19.07 to upgrade to OpenWrt 21.02 or more recent OpenWrt versions.

Router distributions are easy to forget about; now might be a good time to check any relevant systems and, if needed, doing an upgrade.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 21, 2022 is available.