Linux Weekly News

Version 145 of the Thunderbird email client has been released. Notable changes in this release include enabling DNS over HTTPS, support for Microsoft Exchange via Exchange Web Services, and quite a few bug fixes. As of 145, the project is no longer shipping 32-bit binaries for Linux on x86.

Many distributions provide support out of the proverbial box for Flatpak packages, but Fedora is unusual in that it also provides, and defaults, to its own repository of Fedora-built Flatpaks. This has been a source of confusion for Fedora users, who expect to get the Flatpak built by the original developers and hosted on Flathub. It has also been a source of conflict with upstream projects, because users complain of bugs in Flatpak packages they are not responsible for. The situation has also frustrated some Fedora developers, who would prefer to offer put Flathub's offerings first. A new complaint that Fedora has apparently used manifests from Flathub to build the packages for Fedora—without giving credit to the original authors—has spurred discussions about Fedora's Flatpaks once again. While no concrete changes are on the table, yet, there may be some movement toward addressing persistent complaints.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and firefox-esr), Fedora (firefox, rubygem-rack, skopeo, and webkitgtk), Mageia (perl, perl-CPAN, perl-HTTP-Tiny, perl-Data-Entropy, perl-FCGI, perl-File-Find-Rule, perl-YAML-LibYAML, python-tornado, python-urllib3, python-pip, python3, and unbound), Oracle (ipa and kernel), Red Hat (container-tools:rhel8, krb5, openssl, pcs, podman, and runc), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (binutils, kernel, netty, netty-tcnative, podman, python311-pdfminer, and tomcat11), and Ubuntu (bind9 and linux-aws-6.8).

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: FUSE performance; Magic kfuncs; Tails Linux; Direct I/O and modifying buffers; Working with bootable containers.
• Briefs: Kernel LLM policy; Firefox 145; FHS; Homebrew 5.0.0; Mastodon 4.5; Public-inbox 2.0.0; Pytest 9.0.0; Quote; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Version 5.0.0 of the Homebrew package manager for Linux and macOS has been released. Notable changes in this release include download concurrency by default, official support for 64-bit Arm on Linux, and more.

Longtime LWN readers will have encountered the concept of "stable pages" before; it was first covered here nearly 15 years ago. For the most part, the problem that stable pages were meant to solve — preventing errors when user space modifies a buffer that is under I/O — has been dealt with. But recent discussions show that there is one area where problems remain: direct I/O. There is some disagreement, though, over whether those problems are the result of user-space bugs and how much of a performance price should be paid to address them.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, and libtiff), Debian (kernel, libarchive, rust-sudo-rs, and squid), Fedora (chromium, dotnet8.0, forgejo, ruby, and webkitgtk), Oracle (bind, bind9.18, kernel, kernel-uek*, libtiff, and runc), Red Hat (firefox, kernel, and kernel-rt), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (buildah, colord, containerd, kernel, lasso, libsoup, micropython, ongres-scram, openssh, proxy-helm, uyuni-tools, python-pdfminer.six, qatengine, qatlib, regclient, and runc), and Ubuntu (raptor and raptor2).