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Posodobljeno: 22 min 29 sec nazaj
Sre, 04/02/2025 - 16:39
Ryan Sipes has announced
efforts to expand Thunderbird's offerings with web services to
"enhance the experience of using Thunderbird".
The Why for offering these services is simple. Thunderbird loses users
each day to rich ecosystems that are both clients and services, such
as Gmail and Office365. These ecosystems have both hard vendor
lock-ins (through interoperability issues with 3rd-pary clients) and
soft lock-ins (through convenience and integration between their
clients and services). It is our goal to eventually have a similar
offering so that a 100% open source, freedom-respecting alternative
ecosystem is available for those who want it.
The planned services include hosted email, appointment scheduling,
a revival of Firefox Send,
and (of course) an AI assistant based on a partnership with Flower AI. The AI features will
"always be optional for use by people who want them". Sipes is
managing director of product for Thunderbird's parent organization, MZLA
Technologies Corporation. LWN covered his
GUADEC 2024 keynote last July.
Sre, 04/02/2025 - 15:40
Outgoing Fedora Project Leader (FPL) Matthew Miller has announced
his successor, Jef Spaleta.
Some of you may remember Jef's passionate voice in the early Fedora
community. He got involved all the way back in the days of fedora.us,
before Red Hat got involved. Jef served on the Fedora Board from July
2007 through the end of 2008. This was the critical time after Fedora
Extras and Fedora Core merged into one Fedora Linux where, with the
launch of the "Features" process, Fedora became a truly community-led
project.
Spaleta will be joining Red Hat full time in May and Miller will be
formally handing off FPL duties at the Flock conference in
June.
Sre, 04/02/2025 - 15:34
Version
2.0 of PorteuX, a distribution based on Slackware Linux, has been
released. This release adds the ability to test experimental Wayland
sessions for the Cinnamon, LXQt, and Xfce desktops. PorteuX 2.0
updates the Linux kernel to 6.14 and includes many package updates and
bug fixes. Users have the choice of PorteuX stable or its rolling release
called current. See the install.txt
for instructions on installing PorteuX to disk.
Sre, 04/02/2025 - 14:45
The CPU's translation lookaside buffer (TLB) caches the results of
virtual-address translations, significantly speeding memory accesses. TLB
misses are expensive, so a lot of thought goes into using the TLB as
efficiently as possible. Reducing pressure on the TLB was the topic of Rik
van Riel's memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage,
Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. Some approaches were
considered, but the session was short on firm conclusions.
Sre, 04/02/2025 - 14:11
For those of you who still have dedicated audio players:
version 4.0 of
Rockbox, a replacement firmware for many players, has been released.
This release brings support for a number of new devices, updated codecs, a
number of user-interface improvements, some new games, and more. (LWN last
reviewed Rockbox in 2010 — and looked at
the ill-fated
Android port that year as
well).
Sre, 04/02/2025 - 14:03
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, jetty9, openjpeg2, and tomcat9), Fedora (dokuwiki, firefox, php-kissifrot-php-ixr, php-phpseclib3, and rust-zincati), Red Hat (kernel and pki-core), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (apparmor, atop, docker, docker-stable, firefox, govulncheck-vulndb, libmodsecurity3, openvpn, upx, and warewulf4), and Ubuntu (inspircd, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm,
linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle,
linux-oracle-6.8, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-6.8, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, nginx, phpseclib, and vim).
Tor, 04/01/2025 - 19:54
The kernel's slab allocator is charged with providing small objects on
demand; its performance and reliability are crucial for the functioning of
the system as a whole. At the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, two adjacent sessions in the
memory-management track dug into current work on the slab allocator. The
first focused on the new sheaves feature, while the second discussed a set
of allocation functions that are safe to call in any context.
Tor, 04/01/2025 - 19:28
From the LibreQoS site comes
the sad
news that Dave Täht has passed away. Among many other things, he bears
a lot of credit for our networks functioning as well as they do. "We're
incredibly grateful to have Dave as our friend, mentor, and as someone who
continuously inspired us – showing us that we could do better for each
other in the world, and leverage technology to make that happen. He will be
dearly missed".
Searching through LWN's archives will turn up many references to his work
fixing WiFi, improving queue management, tackling bufferbloat, and more. Farewell,
Dave, we hope the music is good wherever you are.
(Thanks to Jon Masters for the heads-up).
Tor, 04/01/2025 - 15:32
As he has in some previous editions of the Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), Fred Knight gave an update
on the status of various storage standards this year. In it, he looked at
changes to the
NVM Express (NVMe)
standards in some detail. He also updated attendees on the fairly small
changes that have come to the SCSI (
T10)
and ATA (
T13) standards over the last few
years.
Tor, 04/01/2025 - 15:00
The kernel's
kexec
mechanism allows one kernel to directly boot a new one; it can be
thought of as a sort of kernel equivalent to the
execve()
system call. Kexec has a number of uses, including booting a special kernel
to perform dumps after a crash. Normally, one does not expect user-space
processes to survive booting into a new kernel, but that has not stopped
developers from trying to implement that ability. Mike Rapoport ran a
memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit to discuss one piece of that problem:
enabling the contents of memory to persist across a kexec handover so that
the new kernel can pick up where the old one left off.
Tor, 04/01/2025 - 14:58
Version
137.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include the
rollout of
tab
groups, a number of search-bar changes, and the ability to add signatures
to PDF files.
Tor, 04/01/2025 - 14:54
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (freetype, grub2, kernel, kernel-rt, and python-jinja2), Debian (freetype, linux-6.1, suricata, tzdata, and varnish), Fedora (mingw-libxslt and qgis), Mageia (elfutils, mercurial, and zvbi), Oracle (grafana, kernel, libxslt, nginx:1.22, and postgresql:12), Red Hat (opentelemetry-collector), SUSE (corosync, opera, and restic), and Ubuntu (aom, libtar, mariadb, ovn, php7.4, php8.1, php8.3, rabbitmq-server, and webkit2gtk).
Pon, 03/31/2025 - 23:26
The virtual memory area (VMA), represented by
struct
vm_area_struct, is one of the core abstractions of the kernel's
memory-management subsystem; a VMA represents a portion of a process's
address space with the same characteristics. A memory-mapped file will be
represented by (at least) one VMA, as will the process's stack or a region
of anonymous memory. Efficiently managing VMAs and the logic around them
is crucial for good performance overall. Lorenzo Stoakes focused on one
specific problem area: the merging of anonymous VMAs, during the
memory-management track at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit.
Pon, 03/31/2025 - 16:07
Migration is the act of moving data from one location in physical
memory to another. The kernel may migrate pages for many reasons,
including defragmentation, improving NUMA locality, moving data to or from
memory hosted on a peripheral device, or freeing a range of
memory for other uses. Given the importance of migration to the
memory-management subsystem, there is a lot of interest in improving its
performance and removing impediments to its success. Several sessions in
the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem,
Memory-Management, and BPF Summit were dedicated to this topic.
Pon, 03/31/2025 - 15:04
The effort to ensure that open-source software is reproducible has been
gathering steam over the years, and gaining traction with major Linux
distributions. Debian, for example, has been working toward reproducible
builds for more than a decade; it can now
produce official
live CDs of the current stable release that are
reproducible. Fedora started on the path much later, but it has
progressed far enough that the project is now considering a change
proposal for the Fedora 43 development cycle, expected to be
released in October, with a goal of
making 99% of Fedora's package builds reproducible. So far, reaction
to the proposal seems favorable and focused primarily on how to
achieve the goal—with minimal pain for packagers—rather than whether to attempt it.
Pon, 03/31/2025 - 14:58
Security updates have been issued by Debian (amd64-microcode, flatpak, intel-microcode, libdata-entropy-perl, librabbitmq, and vim), Fedora (augeas, containerd, crosswords-puzzle-sets-xword-dl, libssh2, libxml2, nodejs-nodemon, and webkitgtk), Red Hat (libreoffice and python-jinja2), SUSE (389-ds, apparmor, corosync, docker, docker-stable, erlang26, exim, ffmpeg-4, govulncheck-vulndb, istioctl, matrix-synapse, mercurial, openvpn, python3, rke2, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (ansible, linux, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4,
linux-ibm, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-nvidia-tegra, linux-nvidia-tegra-igx, linux-realtime, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, opensc, and ruby-doorkeeper).
Sob, 03/29/2025 - 15:57
Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of four stable kernels on March 28: 6.13.9, 6.12.21, 6.6.85, and 6.1.132. Users are advised to upgrade.
Pet, 03/28/2025 - 21:17
KDE contributor David Edmundson has published
a blog post about improving KDE Plasma's login experience by
replacing SDDM
with a new Plasma Login Manager.
It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet,
whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the
2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official
discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list.
Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses
the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn't have all
the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an
architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely
added.
That discussion is here
for those who would like to follow along. The prototype is currently
in two repositories: plasma-login
for the frontend work, and plasma-login-manager,
which is a fork of SDDM.
Pet, 03/28/2025 - 17:31
In a keynote on the final day of
SCALE 22x, Denver
Gingerich said that he wanted to talk "a little bit about a router and
also the big picture around that router". Gingerich is the director of
compliance at the
Software Freedom
Conservancy (SFC), which is the organization behind the
OpenWrt One router that
LWN
looked at back in November. The
router is, of course, based on firmware from the
OpenWrt project, which got its
start because of GPL-enforcement activities and is a member project at the SFC.
Pet, 03/28/2025 - 16:08
As of this writing, 6,653 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the
mainline kernel repository for the 6.15 release. This merge window is thus
well underway. A number of significant changes have been merged so far;
read on for our summary of the first half of the 6.15 merge window.