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Eric Sandeen led a filesystem-track session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit on completing the conversion of the existing kernel filesystems to use the mount API that was added for the 5.2 kernel in 2019. That API is invariably called the "new" API, which it is when compared to the venerable mount() system call, but it has been available for five years or so at this point without really pushing its predecessor aside. Sandeen wanted to discuss the status of the conversion process and some other questions surrounding the new API.

The Rust Blog is carrying an update on what the Rust Types Team has been up to and its near-future plans.

There has been a lot of work on the next-generation trait solver. The initiative posted a separate update at the end of last year. While we would have liked to stabilize its use in coherence a few months ago, this surfaced additional small behavior regressions and hangs, causing delays. We are working on fixing these issues and intend to merge the stabilization PR soon. We are getting close to compiling the standard library and the compiler with the new solver enabled everywhere, after which will be able to run crater to figure out the remaining issues.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, emacs, git, linux-5.10, and org-mode), Fedora (libopenmpt, nginx-mod-modsecurity, and thunderbird), Mageia (emacs, python-ansible-core, and python-authlib), Oracle (git, python3.11, and python3.9), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and samba), and Ubuntu (ansible, cups, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, libheif, openvpn, roundcube, and salt).

TUXEDO OS is an Ubuntu-based distribution developed in Germany by TUXEDO Computers GmbH, designed and optimised for the company's own range of Linux-friendly personal computers and notebooks. The distribution uses KDE Plasma as the preferred desktop. Some of the differences between Ubuntu and TUXEDO OS include custom boot menu, the TUXEDO Control Centre, Calamares installer, availability of the Lutris open gaming platform, preference for the PipeWire audio daemon (over PulseAudio), removal of Ubuntu's snap daemon and snap packages, and various other tweaks and enhancements.

Unison is a MIT-licensed programming language, in development since 2013, that explores the ramifications of making code immutable and stored in a database, instead of a set of text files. Unison supports a greatly simplified model for distributed programming — one that describes the configuration of and communication between programs in the same language as the programs themselves. Along the way, it introduces a new approach to interfacing with programming languages, which is tailored to its design.

Version 4.8.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include performance improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in the image information module, and two new modules for image composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022. Users are "strongly advised" to make a backup of their configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be compatible with darktable 4.6.

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a presentation and Walter asks, "why would you want to boot your containers?" This isn't the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio's keynote at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers (bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who didn't attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating application-container images while using the same tools.

Version:next-20240625 (linux-next) Released:2024-06-25

We have just received the sad news of the passing of Daniel Bristot de Oliveira at far too young an age. He was a strong contributor to the core kernel and associated realtime infrastructure, and always a joyful presence in person; he will be deeply missed.

Nature looks at a recent paper on the openness of "open-source" language models.

It is not yet clear how many of these models will fit the EU's definition of open source. Under the act, this would refer to models that are released under a "free and open" licence that, for example, allows users to modify a model but says nothing about access to training data. Refining this definition will probably form "a single pressure point that will be targeted by corporate lobbies and big companies", the paper says.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (python3.11), Debian (composer), Fedora (thunderbird), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, python-aiohttp, python-gunicorn, python-werkzeug, and virtualbox), Oracle (libreswan and python3.11), Red Hat (git, kpatch-patch, python3.11, python3.9, and thunderbird), and SUSE (avahi, ghostscript, grafana and mybatis, hdf5, kernel, openssl-1_1-livepatches, python-docker, and wget).

Version:next-20240624 (linux-next) Released:2024-06-24

Changwoo Min has posted an introduction to writing custom schedulers with sched_ext.

In a particular situation, when each scheduling policy needs its specific action, the core kernel scheduler calls an operation defined in struct sched_class. For example, when the core kernel scheduler needs to select a task to be scheduled, it calls the sched_class.pick_next_task(rq) callback of a concrete scheduling policy. When a task becomes runnable, the core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.enqueue(rq, p, flags) so the concrete scheduling policy enqueues task p to run queue rq. When a task's runtime state needs to be updated, the core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.update_curr(rq).

GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD and the MATE Desktop Environment. The goal of the project is to lower the barrier to entry of using FreeBSD on a desktop or laptop system, and it largely succeeds at this. While it has a few rough edges that make it hard to recommend for the average desktop user, it is a fine choice for users who want a desktop with FreeBSD underpinnings such as the Z File System (ZFS), and the Ports (source) and Packages (binary) software collections.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ipa and libreswan), Debian (netty), Fedora (python-PyMySQL, tomcat, and webkitgtk), Gentoo (Flatpak, GLib, JHead, LZ4, and RDoc), Mageia (thunderbird), Oracle (nghttp2 and thunderbird), Red Hat (dnsmasq, libreswan, pki-core, and python3.11), Slackware (emacs), SUSE (gnome-settings-daemon, libarchive, qpdf, vte, and wget), and Ubuntu (libhibernate3-java).

Version 29.4 of the Emacs editor has been released. This is "an emergency bugfix release" fixing a vulnerability that can cause the editor to execute arbitrary shell code in Org mode. Anybody who runs Emacs on untrusted files — including those using Gnus or one of the Emacs mail modes — should be looking to update. For those who cannot update, a pair of messages from Russ Allbery and Florian Weimer investigates how to disable the Org-mode evaluation, a task that is seemingly more complicated than it should be.

The 6.10-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So far, the 6.10 release cycle has been fairly calm, and rc5 continues that trend. Let's hope things stay that way."

Version:6.10-rc5 (mainline) Released:2024-06-23 Source:linux-6.10-rc5.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

SDesk is an Arch-based Linux distribution which strives for an easy to use, modern approach to desktop computing. The SDesk project ships up to date software and uses GNOME running on a Wayland session for its default desktop environment. SDesk includes a number of popular open source applications, including LibreOffice and uses Calamares to install the operating system.

The linux-wireless mailing list carries the terse notice that longtime networking developer Larry Finger passed away on June 21. The LWN Kernel Source Database shows that Finger contributed to 94 releases in the (Git era) kernel history, starting with 2.6.16 — 1,464 commits in total. He will be missed.