Linux Weekly News
![Subscribe to Linux Weekly News feed](http://justlinux.ca/misc/feed.png)
uv 0.3.0 released
Version 0.3.0 of the uv Python package and project manager has been released. Introduced in February, uv is written in Rust and aims to be "Cargo for Python". Notable changes in this release include the addition of interfaces for managing projects, installing Python, and running scripts, along with adding new documentation. See the accompanying blog post for more information.
[$] Per-call-site slab caches for heap-spraying protection
Security updates for Tuesday
[$] FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system
The FreeBSD Project is, for the second time this year, engaging in a long-running discussion about the possibility of including Rust in its base system. The sequel to the first discussion included some work by Alan Somers to show what it might look like to use Rust code in the base tree. Support for Rust code does not appear much closer to being included in FreeBSD's base system, but the conversation has been enlightening.
Security updates for Monday
Formatted Rust kernel documentation available
Kernel prepatch 6.11-rc4
But it all looks fairly normal. rc4 is bigger than either rc2 or rc3 were, but not hugely so, and it's actually a normal pattern, where it takes a while before people find some issues. So nothing feels all that odd.
Gentoo Linux drops IA-64 (Itanium) support
The Gentoo Linux project has announced that it is dropping support for Itanium:
Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linux kernel and glibc, and subsequent discussions on our mailing list, as well as a vote by the Gentoo Council, Gentoo will discontinue all ia64 profiles and keywords. The primary reason for this decision is the inability of the Gentoo IA-64 team to support this architecture without kernel support, glibc support, and a functional development box (or even a well-established emulator). In addition, there have been only very few users interested in this type of hardware.[$] Custom string formatters in Python
Python has had formatted string literals (f-strings), a syntactic shorthand for building strings, since 2015. Recently, Jim Baker, Guido van Rossum, and Paul Everitt have proposed PEP 750 ("Tag Strings For Writing Domain-Specific Languages") which would generalize and expand that mechanism to provide Python library writers with additional flexibility. Reactions to the proposed change were somewhat positive, although there was a good deal of discussion of (and opposition to) the PEP's inclusion of lazy evaluation of template parameters.
Security updates for Friday
[$] Memory-management: tiered memory, huge pages, and EROFS
Security updates for Thursday
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 15, 2024
[$] Standards for use of unsafe Rust in the kernel
Rust is intended to let programmers write safer code. But compilers are not omniscient, and writing Rust code that interfaces with hardware (or that works with memory outside of Rust's lifetime paradigm) requires, at some point, the programmer's assurance that some operations are permissible. Benno Lossin suggested adding some more documentation to the Rust-for-Linux project clarifying the standards for commenting uses of unsafe in kernel code. There's general agreement that such standards are necessary, but less agreement on exactly when it is appropriate to use unsafe.
Security updates for Wednesday
[$] Zettlr: note-taking and publishing with Markdown
Markdown editors are a dime a dozen. Cheaper than that, actually, since many of them are open‑source software. Despite the sheer number of options, finding an editor that has all of the features that one might want can be tricky. For some users, Zettlr might be the right tool. It is a What You See is What You Mean (WYSIWYM) editor that stores its work locally as plain Markdown files. The project is billed as a "one-stop publication workbench", and is suitable for writing anything from blog posts to academic papers, maintaining a personal journal, or keeping notes in a Zettlekasten. It is simple to get started with, but rewards deeper exploration and customization.
[$] Changes coming in PostgreSQL 17
The PostgreSQL project has released beta versions of PostgreSQL 17 containing several interesting security and usability improvements, alongside the usual performance improvements and bug fixes. If the release proceeds according to the usual timeline, the full release of version 17 is expected in September or October. The most important changes are in what PostgreSQL does when a database supervisor has their credentials revoked, and added support for incremental database backups.
Lix makes its second release
Lix, the fork of Nix that LWN covered in July, has made its second release since forking. This one includes substantial changes to the backend code, including removing a dependency on Bison, and getting a change to the Nix language back upstream.
The general theme of Lix 2.91 is to perform another wave of refactorings and design improvements in preparation for our evolution plans.
Nevertheless, there are a few exciting user facing changes[.]