Linux Weekly News

The Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) has decided to "restrict Kent Overstreet's participation in the kernel development process during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle" based on a recommendation from the Code of Conduct committee. In particular, the scope of the restriction will be to "decline all pull requests from Kent Overstreet" during the development cycle. Overstreet is the creator and maintainer of the bcachefs filesystem.

This action stems from a message Overstreet posted back in early September that was abusive toward another kernel developer; there is a fair amount of back-and-forth about the incident and the committee's attempts to extract a public apology from Overstreet in that thread. Overstreet has published a lengthy blog post describing his side of the story.

The Linux kernel community's discussions about including Rust have gotten a lot of attention, but the kernel is not the only project wrestling with the question of whether to allow Rust. The Git project discussed the prospect in January, and then again at the Git Contributor's Summit in September. Complicating the discussion is the Git project's lack of a policy on platform support, and the fact that it does already have tools written in other languages. While the project has not committed to using or avoiding Rust, it seems like only a matter of time until maintainers will have to make a decision.

The 6.12.1, 6.11.10, 6.6.63, and 6.1.119 stable kernel updates have been released. As always, they contain important fixes.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (postgresql-13, postgresql-15, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (libsndfile, microcode_ctl, and trafficserver), Mageia (kanboard, kernel, kmod-xtables-addons, kmod-virtualbox, and bluez, kernel-linus, opendmarc, and radare2), Oracle (.NET 9.0, bubblewrap and flatpak, buildah, expat, firefox, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, krb5, libsoup, libvpx, NetworkManager-libreswan, openexr, pcp, python3.11, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.9, squid, thunderbird, tigervnc, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (.NET 9.0, binutils, expat, grafana-pcp, kernel, libsoup, NetworkManager-libreswan, openexr, python3.11, python3.12, python39:3.9, squid, tigervnc, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (chromedriver, cobbler, govulncheck-vulndb, and icinga2), and Ubuntu (linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, python2.7, and zbar).

Version 8.4.1 of the PHP language has been released. See this page for details on the new features in this release. "PHP 8.4 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, such as property hooks, asymmetric visibility, an updated DOM API, performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup."

As of this writing, just over 1,800 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline kernel for the 6.13 release. That number may seem small, given that a typical merge window brings in at least 12,000 commits, but the early pulls this time around have focused on significant core changes, and there are quite a few of them. The time has come to summarize the changes pulled so far, including lazy preemption, multi-grained timestamps, new extended-attribute system calls, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, NetworkManager-libreswan, and openssl), Fedora (chromium and llvm-test-suite), Mageia (thunderbird), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-6.8, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-oracle-6.8,, linux-azure, and ruby2.7).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 21, 2024 is available.

At the 2024 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC), Lyude Paul gave a talk on the work she has been doing as part of the Nova project, which is an effort build an NVIDIA GPU driver in Rust. She wanted to provide an introduction to RVKMS, which is being used to develop Rust kernel mode setting (KMS) bindings; RVKMS is a port of the virtual KMS (VKMS) driver to Rust. In addition, she wanted to give her opinion on Rust, and why she thinks it is a "game-changer for the kernel", noting that the reasons are not related to the oft-mentioned, "headline" feature of the language: memory safety.

Version 4.3 of the Blender animation system has been released. "Brush assets, faster sculpting, a revolutionized Grease Pencil, and more. Blender 4.3 got you covered."

CHICKEN Scheme, a portable Scheme compiler, is gearing up for its next major release. Maintainer Felix Winkelmann has shared an article about what changes to expect in version 6 of the language, including better Unicode support and support for the R7RS (small) Scheme standard.

Every major release is a chance of fixing long-standing problems with the codebase and address bad design decisions. CHICKEN is now nearly 25 years old and we had many major overhauls of the system. Sometimes these caused a lot of pain, but still we always try to improve things and hopefully make it more enjoyable and practical for our users. There are places in the code that are messy, too complex, or that require cleanup or rewrite, always sitting there waiting to be addressed. On the other hand CHICKEN has been relatively stable compared to many other language implementations and has a priceless community of users that help us improving it. Our users never stop reminding us of what could be better, where the shortcomings are, where things are hard to use or inefficient.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (guix, libmodule-scandeps-perl, needrestart, and thunderbird), SUSE (gh), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-hwe-6.8, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-iot, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, needrestart, python2.7, python3.10, python3.12, python3.8, and Waitress).

Version 9.5 of the Rocky Linux distribution is out. As with the AlmaLinux 9.5 release, Rocky Linux 9.5 tracks the changes in upstream RHEL 9.5. See the release notes for details.

It took more than 20 years, but the FreeCAD computer-aided design project has just made its 1.0 release.

Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a built-in assembly module.

Well, I'm very proud to say those two issues are now solved.

The most common piece of advice given to users who ask about running their own mail server is don't. Setting up and securing a mail server in 2024 is not for the faint of heart, nor for anyone without copious spare time. Spammers want to flood inboxes with ads for questionable supplements, attackers want to abuse servers to send spam (or worse), and getting the big providers to accept mail from small servers is a constant uphill battle. Michael W. Lucas, however, encourages users to thumb their nose at the "Email Empire", and declare email independence. His self-published book, Run Your Own Mail Server, provides a manual (and manifesto) for users who are interested in the challenge.

Version 6.7 of the Incus container-management system (forked from LXD) has been released. "This is another one of those pretty well rounded releases with new features and improvements for everyone". New features include automatic cluster rebalancing, DHCP improvements, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0, bcc, bluez, bpftrace, bubblewrap, flatpak, buildah, cockpit, containernetworking-plugins, cups, cyrus-imapd, edk2, expat, firefox, fontforge, gnome-shell, gnome-shell-extensions, grafana, grafana-pcp, gtk3, httpd, iperf3, jose, krb5, libgcrypt, libsoup, libvirt, libvpx, lldpd, microcode_ctl, mingw-glib2, mod_auth_openidc, nano, NetworkManager, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, openexr, osbuild-composer, pcp, podman, poppler, postfix, python-dns, python-jinja2, python-jwcrypto, python3.11, python3.11-PyMySQL, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.12-PyMySQL, python3.12-urllib3, python3.9, qemu-kvm, runc, skopeo, squid, thunderbird, toolbox, tpm2-tools, vim, webkit2gtk3, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Fedora (lemonldap-ng and mingw-expat), SUSE (bea-stax, xstream, expat, httpcomponents-client, httpcomponents-core, kernel, SUSE Manager Client Tools, SUSE Manager Proxy, Retail Branch Server 4.3, SUSE Manager Salt Bundle, SUSE Manager Server 4.3, and SUSE Manager Server 5.0), and Ubuntu (curl, glib2.0, and webkit2gtk).

Version 9.5 of the AlmaLinux enterprise-oriented distribution has been released.

AlmaLinux 9.5 aims to improve performance, development tooling, and security. Updated module streams offer better support for web applications. New versions of compilers provide access to the latest features and optimizations that improve performance and enable better code generation. The release also introduces improvements to system performance monitoring, visualization, and system performance data collecting.

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced the release of a security audit report conducted by security firm Synacktiv. The audit uncovered a number of vulnerabilities:

Most of these vulnerabilities have been addressed through official FreeBSD Project security advisories, which offer detailed information about each vulnerability, its impact, and the measures implemented to improve the security of FreeBSD systems. [...]

The audit uncovered 27 vulnerabilities and issues within various FreeBSD subsystems. 7 issues were not exploitable and were robustness or code quality improvements rather than immediate security concerns.

Linus Torvalds released the 6.12 kernel on November 17, as expected. This development cycle, the last for 2024, brought 13,344 non-merge changesets into the mainline kernel; that made it a relatively slow cycle from this perspective, but 6.12 includes a long list of significant new features. The time has come to look at where those changes came from, and to look at the year-long LTS cycle as well.