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Posodobljeno: 38 min 28 sec nazaj
Sob, 08/05/2023 - 20:40
Faith Ekstrand
announces
on the Collabora blog
that NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, will be included in the
Mesa 23.3 release.
Merging into mesa/main is certainly a big milestone but NVK is
nowhere near finished. It will take a long time before we get the
bugs worked out and get a full feature set with reasonable
performance. What it does mean is that we're pretty confident in
the core of the driver and that we have a good base to build on
going forward.
The necessary kernel support is planned for the 6.6 release; this
blog post from David Airlie describes the work being done on that side.
Sob, 08/05/2023 - 15:29
Bram Moolenaar, the creator of the vim editor,
passed
away on August 3. "Bram dedicated a large part of his life to
VIM and he was very proud of the VIM community that you are all part
of." He will be missed.
Pet, 08/04/2023 - 15:26
The big kernel lock (BKL) is a distant memory now but, for years, it was
one of the more intractable problems faced by the kernel development
community. The end of the BKL does not mean that the kernel is without
problematic locks, however. In recent times, some attention has been paid
to the software-interrupt (or "bottom half") lock, which can create latency
problems, especially on realtime systems. Frederic Weisbecker is taking a
new tack in his campaign to cut this lock down to size, with an approach
based on how the BKL was eventually removed.
Pet, 08/04/2023 - 15:18
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (bind and kernel), Debian (cjose, firefox-esr, ntpsec, and python-django), Fedora (chromium, firefox, librsvg2, and webkitgtk), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox and openssh), SUSE (go1.20, ImageMagick, javapackages-tools, javassist, mysql-connector-java, protobuf, python-python-gflags, kernel, openssl-1_1, pipewire, python-pip, and xtrans), and Ubuntu (cargo, rust-cargo, cpio, poppler, and xmltooling).
Čet, 08/03/2023 - 15:39
The kernel community has never had a smooth relationship with the purveyors
of proprietary kernel modules. Developers tend to strongly dislike those
modules, which cannot be debugged or fixed by anybody other than their
creator, and many see them as a violation of the kernel's license and their
copyrights on the code. Nonetheless, proprietary modules are tolerated,
within bounds. A recent patch from Christoph Hellwig suggests that those
bounds are about to be tightened slightly, in a somewhat surprising way.
Čet, 08/03/2023 - 15:30
The
6.4.8,
6.1.43, and
5.15.124 stable kernels have been released.
As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree.
Čet, 08/03/2023 - 15:23
Security updates have been issued by Debian (linux-5.10), Red Hat (.NET 6.0 and iperf3), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (kernel, mariadb, poppler, and python-Django), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, gst-plugins-good1.0, maradns, openjdk-20, and vim).
Čet, 08/03/2023 - 03:30
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 3, 2023 is available.
Sre, 08/02/2023 - 23:01
The Python global interpreter lock (GIL) has long been a barrier to
increasing the performance of programs by using multiple threads—the GIL
serializes access to the interpreter's virtual machine such that only one thread
can be executing Python code at any given time. There are other mechanisms
to provide
concurrency for the language, but the specter of the GIL—and its reality as
well—have often been cited as a major negative for Python. Back in October
2021, Sam Gross
introduced
a
proof-of-concept, no-GIL version of the
language. It was met with a lot of excitement at the time, but
seemed to languish to a certain extent for more than a year; now, the Python
Steering
Council has
announced its intent to accept the
no-GIL feature. It will still be some time before it lands in a
released Python version—and there is the possibility that it all has to be
rolled back at some point—but there are several companies backing the
effort, which gives it all a good chance to succeed.
Sre, 08/02/2023 - 18:06
Google's Project Zero has spent some time studying the Arm memory tagging
extension (MTE),
support for which was
merged into the 5.10 kernel, and
posted
the results:
Despite its limitations, MTE is still by far the most promising
path forward for improving C/C++ software security in 2023. The
ability of MTE to detect memory corruption exploitation at the
first dangerous access provides a significant improvement in
diagnostic and potential security effectiveness.
There is a
separate section on weaknesses in the current kernel implementation of
MTE support.
Sre, 08/02/2023 - 17:41
The
Asahi Linux project, which is
working to create a Linux distribution for Apple hardware, has
announced
that its new "flagship" distribution will be based on Fedora Linux.
Working directly with upstream means not only can we integrate more
closely with the core distribution, but we can also get issues in
other packages fixed quickly and smoothly. This is particularly
important for platforms like desktop ARM64, where we still run into
random app and package bugs quite often. ARM64 desktop Linux has
been a niche platform (until now!), and with much less testing
comes a higher propensity for bugs, so it’s very important that we
can address these issues quickly. Fedora already has a very solid,
fully supported ARM64 port with a large userbase in the
server/headless segment, so it is an excellent base to build upon
and help improve the state of desktop Linux on ARM64 for everyone.
There is a version for "adventurous users" to play with now, with an
official release expected by the end of the month.
Sre, 08/02/2023 - 14:54
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bouncycastle), Fedora (firefox), Red Hat (cjose, curl, iperf3, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libeconf, libxml2, mod_auth_openidc:2.3, openssh, and python-requests), SUSE (firefox, jtidy, libredwg, openssl, salt, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and SUSE Manager Salt Bundle), and Ubuntu (firefox).
Tor, 08/01/2023 - 21:43
Kernel testing is a perennial topic at Linux-related conferences and the
KernelCI project is one of the larger testing
players. It does its own testing but also coordinates with various other
testing systems and aggregates their
results. At the
2023
Embedded
Open Source Summit (EOSS), KernelCI developer Nikolai Kondrashov gave a
presentation on the testing framework, its database, and how others can get
involved in the project. He also had some thoughts on where KernelCI is
falling short of its goals and potential, along with some ideas of ways to
improve it.
Tor, 08/01/2023 - 14:54
Here is
a
long reminiscence from Jon "maddog" Hall leading up to some thoughts on
Red Hat's source-release policy changes.
Recently I have been seeing some cracks in the dike. As more and
more users of FOSS come on board, they put more and more demands on
developers whose numbers are not growing sufficiently fast enough
to keep all the software working.
I hear from FOSS developers that too few, and sometimes no,
developers are working on blocks of code. Of course this can also
happen to closed-source code, but this shortness hits mostly in
areas that are not considered “sexy”, such as quality assurance,
release engineering, documentation and translations.
Tor, 08/01/2023 - 14:29
Version 2.38 of
the GNU C Library has been released. This release consists mostly of
relatively small changes, including improved support for working with
binary integer constants, some new printf() formatting options,
libmvec support for 64-bit Arm systems, the strlcpy() and
strlcat() string functions, and more. See
the release notes
for the details.
Tor, 08/01/2023 - 14:23
Security updates have been issued by Debian (tiff), Fedora (curl), Red Hat (bind, ghostscript, iperf3, java-1.8.0-ibm, nodejs, nodejs:18, openssh, postgresql:15, and samba), Scientific Linux (iperf3), Slackware (mozilla and seamonkey), SUSE (compat-openssl098, gnuplot, guava, openssl-1_0_0, pipewire, python-requests, qemu, samba, and xmltooling), and Ubuntu (librsvg, openjdk-8, openjdk-lts, openjdk-17, openssh, rabbitmq-server, and webkit2gtk).
Pon, 07/31/2023 - 16:05
Version 29.1 of the Emacs editor has been released. There is a long list
of changes, including integration with the
Tree-sitter
incremental parsing library, the ability to access SQLite databases,
"pure GTK" display support (which enables
Wayland support), and a lot more; see
the
NEWS file for all the details.
Pon, 07/31/2023 - 15:58
Version 3.2 of the GNU COBOL compiler is out. "The amount of features
are too much to note, but you can skip over the attached NEWS file to
investigate them." These new features include improved support for
COBOL dialects, performance improvements, better GDB debugging support, and
more.
Pon, 07/31/2023 - 15:46
It is well understood that concurrency makes programming problems harder;
the high level of concurrency inherent in kernel development is one of the
reasons why kernel work can be challenging. Things can get even worse,
though, if concurrent access happens in places where the code is not
expecting it. The long story accompanying
this
short patch from Christian Brauner is illustrative of the kind of
problem that can arise when assumptions about concurrency prove to be
incorrect.
Pon, 07/31/2023 - 15:04
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (apr-util, bcel, c-ares, emacs, git, java-1.8.0-openjdk, libwebp, open-vm-tools, python, and python3), Debian (amd64-microcode, kernel, and thunderbird), Fedora (iperf3), SUSE (cdi-apiserver-container, cdi-cloner-container, cdi- controller-container, cdi-importer-container, cdi-operator-container, cdi- uploadproxy-container, cdi-uploadserver-container, cont, cjose, java-17-openjdk, jtidy, kernel-firmware, kubevirt, virt-api-container, virt-controller-container, virt-handler-container, virt-launcher-container, virt-libguestfs-tools- container, virt-operator-container, libqt5-qtbase, librsvg, libvirt, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-3, qemu, samba, thunderbird, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (linux-iot and wireshark).