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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Finding concurrency bugs with sched_ext; Rust abstractions; 6.14 Merge window; Sealed system mappings; OpenSUSE board; Julia; Site tour.
• Briefs: Binutils 2.44; Firefox 135.0; Freedesktop GitLab; GNU C Library 2.41; GTK; Servo; Thunderbird updates; Sanctions; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Servo Rust-based rendering engine project has published an article summarizing its progress in 2024, and plans for the future:

Servo main dependencies (SpiderMonkey, Stylo and WebRender) have been upgraded, the new layout engine has kept evolving adding support for floats, tables, flexbox, fonts, etc. By the end of 2024 Servo passes 1,515,229 WPT subtests (79%). Many other new features have been under active development: WebGPU, Shadow DOM, ReadableStream, WebXR, ... Servo now supports two new platforms: Android and OpenHarmony. And we have got the first experiments of applications using Servo as a web engine (like Tauri, Blitz, QtWebView, Cuervo, Verso and Moto).

Over the past year or so, LWN has added a number of useful new features for our subscribers to enhance the experience of reading and commenting on our content. Those features are of little use, however, to readers who do not know about them. It has been more than a decade since we last provided a tour of the site—it seems that another is in order. Walk this way for a look at the LWN kernel source database (KSDB), enhanced commenting features, EPUB downloads, and more.

Jake Hillion gave a presentation at FOSDEM about using sched_ext, the BPF scheduling framework that was introduced in kernel version 6.12, to help find elusive concurrency problems. In collaboration with Johannes Bechberger, he has built a scheduler that can reveal theoretically possible but unobserved concurrency bugs in test code in a few minutes. Since their scheduler only relies on mainline kernel features, it can theoretically be applied to any application that runs on Linux — although there are a number of caveats since the project is still in its early days.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libreoffice), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (google-osconfig-agent, grafana, helm, and rime-schema-all), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-lowlatency, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-23, openjdk-8, and openjdk-lts).

Version:next-20250205 (linux-next) Released:2025-02-05

Apple Passwords is a password manager application which lets users store and access encrypted account information. Passwords is proprietary software. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives for Linux.

The post Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Apple Passwords appeared first on Linux Today.

One of the most significant advancements in software development is the ability to create apps that work seamlessly across different operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac.

This cross-platform compatibility ensures that users don’t have to worry about switching devices or operating systems – they can enjoy the same apps, features, and functionality everywhere.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the best cross-platform apps that work smoothly on Linux, Windows, and Mac.

The post Top Cross-Platform Apps for Linux, Windows, and Mac in 2025 appeared first on Linux Today.

As of January, 2025, the Linux Kernel Source has approximately 40 Million lines of code! This is one of the greatest achievements in the history of open-source, community-driven projects.

The post Linux Kernel Source Code Surpasses 40 Million Lines [January 2025 Update] appeared first on Linux Today.

To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 19 high quality Linux graphical calculator tools. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wants more functionality offered by simple calculators.

The post 19 Best Free and Open Source Linux Graphical Calculators appeared first on Linux Today.

This roundup features the finest terminal-based Matrix clients. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.

The post 5 Best Free and Open Source Terminal-Based Matrix Clients appeared first on Linux Today.

This article showcases free, open-source cybersecurity tools that help you identify and address vulnerabilities, detect intrusion, protect websites from cyber attacks, monitor and detect suspicious activities across your network.

The post Don’t Let These Open-Source Cybersecurity Tools Slip Under Your Radar appeared first on Linux Today.

Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. We recommend the finest GUI-based tools.

The post 16 Best Free and Open Source Graphical Git Clients appeared first on Linux Today.

Apache CouchDB is an open-source NoSQL and document-oriented database that supports multiple formats and protocols to store its data. Apache CouchDB allows you to use JSON to store data, and it also provides web UI for managing the CouchDB system and HTTP API that enables you to query data easily.

The post How to Install Apache Couch DB on AlmaLinux 9 appeared first on Linux Today.

Jeff Xu has been working on a patch set that makes certain mappings in a process's address space impossible to change, sealing them against tampering. This has some potential security benefits — mainly, making sure that someone cannot relocate the vsyscall and vDSO mappings — but some kernel developers haven't been impressed with the patches. While the core functionality (sealing the mappings) is sound, some of the supporting code for enabling and disabling the new feature caused concern by going against the normal design for such things. Reviewers also questioned how this feature would interact with checkpointing and with sandboxing.

In Bash shell scripting on Linux, the declare command is used to define, set attributes, modify, and display variables and functions.

The post Bash declare Command Usage With Examples appeared first on Linux Today.

Linux has a good range of port scanners that help administrators identify and rectify weaknesses in a system. We recommend the best terminal-based tools.

The post 9 Best Free and Open Source Linux Terminal-Based Port Scanners appeared first on Linux Today.

Version 135.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Changes include more languages for the translations feature, increasing roll-out of the credit-card autofill and AI chatbot features, and (perhaps most welcome):

Firefox now includes safeguards to prevent sites from abusing the history API by generating excessive history entries, which can make navigating with the back and forward buttons difficult by cluttering the history. This intervention ensures that such entries, unless interacted with by the user, are skipped when using the back and forward buttons.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (openjdk-17), Fedora (chromium, fastd, ovn, and yq), Mageia (libxml2 and redis), Oracle (gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good), Red Hat (buildah, bzip2, galera, mariadb, grafana, keepalived, libsoup, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, mingw-glib2, podman, python-jinja2, and rsync), SUSE (bind, ignition, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, krb5, libxml2, openssl-1_1, orc, python-asteval, rsync, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (harfbuzz, libndp, libvpx, and opencv).

Fzf is a superfast command-line tool to quickly locate files in an interactive session and append the result to other commands by piping.

The post Fzf: Quick Search via Fuzzy Finder on Linux (Install + Use) appeared first on Linux Today.