Linux Weekly News

One of the simplest hardening concepts to understand is that memory should never be both writable and executable, otherwise an attacker can use it to load and run arbitrary code. That rule is generally followed in Linux systems, but there is a glaring loophole that is exploitable from user space to inject code into a running process. Attackers have duly exploited it. A new effort to close the hole ran into trouble early in the merge window, but a solution may yet be found in time for the 6.11 kernel release.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (linux-firmware and squid), Debian (bind9), Fedora (kubernetes, thunderbird, and tinyproxy), Oracle (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-container, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Red Hat (freeradius:3.0, httpd, and squid), and SUSE (giflib and python-dnspython).

In the previous episode of the vgetrandom() story, Jason Donenfeld had put together a version of the getrandom() system call that ran in user space, significantly improving performance for applications that need a lot of random data while retaining all of the guarantees provided by the system call. At that time, it seemed that a consensus had built around the implementation and that it was headed toward the mainline in that form. A few milliseconds after that article was posted, though, a Linus-Torvalds-shaped obstacle appeared in its path. That obstacle has been overcome and this work has now been merged for the 6.11 kernel, but its form has changed somewhat.

On July 12, Jocelyn Falempe proposed a change to the configuration options that Fedora sets for its kernels, in order to make kernel panics easier to report. Falempe would like to enable the kernel's recently added DRM-panic feature, which adds a graphical crash screen that is reminiscent of the infamous Windows "blue screen of death" for kernel panics. The feature introduces a few tradeoffs, including currently limited driver support, so the proposal spawned a good deal of discussion.

Version 1.80.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include the new LazyCell and LazyLock types (which delay data initialization until the first access), the stabilization of the exclusive-range syntax for match patterns, and more.

The 6.9.11, 6.6.42, and 6.1.101 stable kernels have been released. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the tree.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, python3, and runc), Fedora (exim, python-zipp, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, and xmedcon), Red Hat (cups, fence-agents, freeradius, freeradius:3.0, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:18, podman, and resource-agents), Slackware (htdig and libxml2), SUSE (exim), and Ubuntu (ocsinventory-server, php-cas, and poppler).

Linux Mint has announced version 22 of the distribution in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Mint 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04 and uses kernel version 6.8.0:

Linux Mint 22 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2029. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

LWN covered the Linux Mint 22 beta in early July. See the new features page and release notes for more information on this release.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 25, 2024 is available.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.10.1 stable kernel update. This release contains a small number of seemingly urgent regression fixes. Users of this kernel series are advised to upgrade.

Updated installation images for the OpenMandriva ROME rolling release Linux distribution are now available. Notable features in the 24.07 snapshot include KDE Plasma 6 as the default desktop, the addition of Proton and Proton experimental packages for playing Windows games on Linux, as well as GNOME 46.3 and LXQt 2.0.0 spins.

OpenSSL has announced that it has adopted a new governance framework:

The OpenSSL Management Committee (OMC) has been dissolved, and two boards of directors have been elected for the Foundation and the Corporation. Each organization has ten voting members. These boards share all the responsibilities and authorities of the former OMC co-equally.

To further engage our communities, we are establishing two advisory committees for each entity: a Business Advisory Committee (BAC) and a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC). The communities will elect the members of the BACs and TACs, creating a direct channel for community input in roadmap development and reflecting the diverse perspectives of OpenSSL's communities.

OpenSSL has also announced that two projects have adopted the OpenSSL Mission and become OpenSSL projects: Bouncy Castle, which provides cryptographic APIs for Java and C#, and the cryptlib security software development toolkit. See the announcement for full details.

David Howells wanted to discuss swap handling in light of multi-page folios in a combined storage, filesystem, and memory-management session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Swapping has always been done with a one-to-one mapping of memory pages to swap slots, he said, but swapping multi-page folios breaks that assumption. He wondered if it would make sense to use filesystem techniques to track swapped-out folios.

Ryan Sipes told the audience during his keynote at GUADEC 2024 in Denver, Colorado that the Thunderbird mail client "probably shouldn't still be alive". Thunderbird, however, is not only alive—it is arguably in better shape than ever before. According to Sipes, the project's turnaround is a result of governance, storytelling, and learning to be comfortable asking users for money. He would also like it quite a bit if Linux distributions stopped turning off telemetry.

Let's Encrypt has announced that it intends to end support "as soon as possible" for the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) over privacy concerns. OCSP was developed as a lighter-weight alternative to Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) that did not involve downloading the entire CRL in order to check whether a certificate was valid. Let's Encrypt will continue supporting OCSP as long as it is a requirement for Microsoft's Trusted Root Program, but hopes to discontinue it soon:

We plan to end support for OCSP primarily because it represents a considerable risk to privacy on the Internet. When someone visits a website using a browser or other software that checks for certificate revocation via OCSP, the Certificate Authority (CA) operating the OCSP responder immediately becomes aware of which website is being visited from that visitor's particular IP address. Even when a CA intentionally does not retain this information, as is the case with Let's Encrypt, CAs could be legally compelled to collect it. CRLs do not have this issue.

People using Let's Encrypt as their CA should, for the most part, not need to change their setups. All modern browsers support CRLs, so end-users shouldn't notice an impact either.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ghostscript and xmedcon), Gentoo (Dmidecode, ExifTool, and Freenet), Red Hat (containernetworking-plugins, cups, edk2, httpd, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libreoffice, libuv, libvirt, linux-firmware, nghttp2, nodejs, openssh, python3, runc, thunderbird, and tpm2-tss), Slackware (aaa_glibc, bind, and mozilla), SUSE (postgresql14, python-sentry-sdk, and shadow), and Ubuntu (activemq, bind9, haproxy, nova, provd, python-zipp, squid, squid3, and tomcat).

Simon Willison, co-creator of the popular Django web framework for Python, gave a keynote presentation at PyCon 2024 on topic that is unrelated to that work: large language models (LLMs). The topic grew out of some other work that he is doing on Datasette, which is a Python-based "tool for exploring and publishing data". The talk was a look beyond the hype to try to discover what useful things you can actually do today using these models. Unsurprisingly, there were some cautionary notes from Willison, as well.

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) board has announced improvements to its grants program that have been enacted as a response to "concerns and frustrations" with the program:

The PSF Board takes the open letter from the pan-African delegation seriously, and we began to draft a plan to address everything in the letter. We also set up improved two-way communications so that we can continue the conversation with the community. The writers of the open letter have now met several times with members of the PSF board. We are thankful for their insight and guidance on how we can work together and be thoroughly and consistently supportive of the pan-African Python community.

So far the PSF has set up office hours to improve communications, published a retrospective on the DjangoCon Africa review, and put out a transparency report on grants from the past two years. The PSF board has also voted to "use the same criteria for all grant requests, no matter their country of origin".

Mark Zuckerberg has posted an article announcing some new releases of the Llama large language model and going on at length about why open-source models are important:

AI has more potential than any other modern technology to increase human productivity, creativity, and quality of life – and to accelerate economic growth while unlocking progress in medical and scientific research. Open source will ensure that more people around the world have access to the benefits and opportunities of AI, that power isn't concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies, and that the technology can be deployed more evenly and safely across society.

There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer.

Of course, whether Llama is truly open source is debatable at best, but it is more open than many of the alternatives.

LWN has covered BPF since its initial introduction to Linux, usually through the lens of the newest developments; this can make it hard to view the whole picture. BPF provides a way to extend a running kernel, without having to recompile and reboot. It does this in a safe way, so that malicious BPF programs cannot crash a running kernel, thanks to the BPF verifier. So how does the verifier actually work, what are its limits, and how has it changed since the early days of BPF?