Linux Weekly News

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, gcc, libxml2, nodejs:18, and nodejs:20), Debian (freerdp2, golang-glog, trafficserver, and tryton-client), Fedora (chromium, krb5, libheif, microcode_ctl, nginx, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, and webkitgtk), Mageia (ffmpeg, golang, postgresql13 and postgresql15, and python-zipp), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, gcc, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, kernel, libxml2, and nodejs:20), Red Hat (gcc, idm:DL1, and ipa), SUSE (buildah, chromium, glibc, kernel, kernel-firmware-all-20250206, libecpg6, postgresql15, python, python3, python311, and ruby3.4-rubygem-rack), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode).

The 6.14-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing; the announcement, for unknown reasons, went only to the linux-btrfs list.

So the first few weeks of the 6.14 release development were smaller-than-usual, but rc3 is actually right in line with normal releases at this point. Probably just timing of pull requests, and we'll see how next week goes. But nothing looks worrisome.

Along with the usual stream of fixes, this release includes the "faux bus", designed for simple drivers that just need some sort of virtual bus to be associated with; this bus come with Rust bindings from the outset.

There are many challenges involved with running a web site like LWN. Some of them, such as finding the courage to write for people who know more about the subject matter than we do, simply come with the territory we have chosen. But others show up as an unwelcome surprise; the ongoing task of fending off bots determined to scrape the entire Internet to (seemingly) feed into the insatiable meat grinder of AI training is certainly one of those. Readers have, at times, expressed curiosity about that fight and how we are handling it; read on for a description of a modern-day plague.

Memcached is a memory-based data-caching daemon that has a long history. More than twenty years after its first public release, Memcached strives to remain relevant in a vastly changed computing landscape, balancing new features with a commitment to the original principles that separate it from newer alternatives like Redis and Hazelcast.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (doxygen, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, kernel, and libxml2), Debian (chromium, postgresql-13, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (krb5, openssl, and python3.13), Mageia (ark, ofono, and perl-Net-OAuth, perl-Crypt-URandom, perl-Module-Build), Oracle (firefox, gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, kernel, openssl, tbb, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libxml2), SUSE (chromium, golang-github-prometheus-prometheus, grafana, kernel, kernel-firmware-ath10k-20250206, kernel-firmware-bnx2-20250206, kernel-firmware-brcm-20250206, kernel-firmware-chelsio-20250206, kernel-firmware-dpaa2-20250206, kernel-firmware-mwifiex-20250206, kernel-firmware-platform-20250206, kernel-firmware-realtek-20250206, kernel-firmware-serial-20250206, kernel-firmware-ueagle-20250206, libtasn1, python312, qemu, SUSE Manager Client Tools, SUSE Manager Client Tools MU 5.0.3, and ucode-intel-20250211), and Ubuntu (activemq and libsndfile).

The Asahi Linux project, which is working to support Linux on Apple silicon, has announced the resignation of Hector "marcan" Martin as its lead, and his replacement by a seven-person committee. "Today's news is bittersweet. We are grateful to marcan for kicking off this project and tirelessly working on it these past years. Our community will miss him. Still, with your support, the project has a bright future to come". Martin has explained his reasons for leaving at length in this blog post.

The openSUSE project has announced that future installations of the Tumbleweed rolling distribution will use SELinux for mandatory access control rather than AppArmor. Existing installations will not be migrated, and AppArmor will continue to be maintained for Tumbleweed. The openSUSE Leap 15 distribution is not changing.

Huge pages can increase the performance of many programs, but they can also have unfortunate performance impacts of their own. Over the last few years, multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) have increasingly been seen as a happy medium that bring the benefits of huge pages at a lower cost. The system cannot benefit from mTHPs, though, if it does not create them; two developers have independently posted patches to enable the creation of mTHPs in the background.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (doxygen and openssl), Debian (dcmtk and webkit2gtk), Fedora (chromium, clevis-pin-tpm2, envision, fido-device-onboard, gotify-desktop, keylime-agent-rust, keyring-ima-signer, libkrun, python3.10, python3.11, python3.14, rust-afterburn, rust-cargo-vendor-filterer, rust-coreos-installer, rust-eif_build, rust-gst-plugin-reqwest, rust-nu, rust-openssl, rust-openssl-sys, rust-pore, rust-rpm-sequoia, rust-sequoia-keyring-linter, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-policy-config, rust-sequoia-sqv, rust-sevctl, rust-snphost, rust-tealdeer, rustup, and s390utils), Mageia (ffmpeg, php-tcpdf, python-tornado, and subversion), Red Hat (openssl and python-jinja2), SUSE (crun, glibc, kernel, libngtcp2-16, libtasn1, netty, ovmf, podman, python, and python3), and Ubuntu (ansible, digikam, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-azure-6.8, and ruby2.7).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: BPF load-time checking; IRQ suspension; Rust for Linux; Rewriting coreutils; Selfish contributors; emlearn.
• Briefs: RfL policy; OpenWrt 24.10.0; Arti 1.4.0; LibreOffice 25.2; OpenInfra; Plasma 6.3; Attacks on Codeberg; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Codeberg development forge has recently been subject to sustained attacks resulting in, among other things, abusive email being sent to the site's users. The organization has now put up a description and a defiant response:

Extreme right forces actively target members of our communities and discriminate based on ethnicity and gender, political background, sexual orientation, disabilities, nationality and faith. However diversity is an important asset in free/libre software communities and it is what makes our software great and development productive.

By targeting some of our most active translators, nicest designers, best developers and all other motivated contributors, they are hurting the free/libre software ecosystem as a whole.

While large language models and the expensive hardware they require are all the rage now, other areas of artificial intelligence work within much more constrained hardware environments. At FOSDEM 2025, Jon Nordby presented his open-source machine-learning inference engine for microcontrollers, named emlearn. The project also boasts bindings for MicroPython, thus making machine-learning applications even more accessible.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (bind9, cacti, pam-pkcs11, and ruby2.7), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, chromium, crun, and java-21-openjdk), Mageia (calibre, nginx, python-ansible-core, python-jinja2, python-pip, python-setuptools, python-twisted, and python-waitress), Red Hat (doxygen, firefox, gcc, gcc-toolset-13-gcc, gcc-toolset-14-gcc, tbb, and thunderbird), SUSE (go1.24, govulncheck-vulndb, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, openssl-3, ovmf, python3-numpy, python311, python36, qemu, and skopeo), and Ubuntu (bluez and openssl).

Most Linux systems depend on a suite of core utilities that the GNU Project started development on decades ago and are, of course, written in C. At FOSDEM 2025, Sylvestre Ledru made the case in his main stage talk that modern systems require safer, more maintainable tools. Over the past few years, Ledru has led the charge of rewriting the GNU Core Utilities (coreutils) in Rust, as the MIT-licensed uutils project. The goal is to offer what he said are more secure, and more performant drop-in replacements for the tools Linux users depend on. At FOSDEM, Ledru announced that the uutils project is setting its sights even higher.

High-performance networking is a highly tuned activity; the amount of time available to deal with each packet may be measured in nanoseconds, so care must be taken to avoid anything that might slow the process down. Recently, there has been a fair amount of attention given to a patch set merged for 6.13 that, it is claimed, can improve processing efficiency (and, thus, power savings) in data centers by as much as 30%. The change itself, contributed by Joe Damato and Martin Karsten, is a relatively small tweak to existing optimization techniques; it shows just how much care is needed to optimize a high-bandwidth server.

Version 6.3 of the Plasma desktop has been released.

One year on, with the teething problems a major new release inevitably brings firmly behind us, Plasma's developers have worked on fine-tuning, squashing bugs and adding features to Plasma 6 — turning it into the best desktop environment for everyone.

Changes include improved support for drawing tablets, better fractional-scaling support, and more.

The 6.6.77 stable kernel update has been released; it contains a single fix for a User Mode Linux build problem.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, tbb, and thunderbird), Debian (cacti, libtasn1-6, and rust-openssl), Oracle (galera and mariadb, kernel, raptor2, and thunderbird), SUSE (bind, fq, java-21-openj9, libtasn1-6-32bit, ovmf, python310, python312, python313, python314, rime-schema-all, thunderbird, and wget), and Ubuntu (eglibc, firefox, glibc, linux, linux-aws, linux-lts-xenial, ruby2.3, ruby2.5, and vim).

Miguel Ojeda gave a keynote at FOSDEM 2025 about the history of the Rust-for-Linux project, and the current attitude of people in the kernel community toward the experiment. Unlike his usual talks, this talk didn't focus so much on the current state of the project, but rather on discussing history and predictions for the future. He ended up presenting quotes from more than 30 people involved in kernel development about what they thought of the project and expected going forward.

Version 1.4.0 of Arti, the Tor Project's next-generation Tor client written in Rust, has been released. Notable improvements in this release include a new RPC interface, and preparatory work toward service-side onion service denial-of-service resistance. The release is dedicated to the memory of Jérémy Bobbio, better known by many as "Lunar". For full details on the release, see the changelog.