LWN
LWN.net is a comprehensive source of news and opinions from
and about the Linux community. This is the main LWN.net feed,
listing all articles which are posted to the site front page.
URL: https://lwn.net
Updated: 2 hours 34 min ago
Announcing notqmail
The notqmail project has announced its
existence and shipped
an initial release. It's a new fork of the venerable qmail mail
transport system. "Our first release is informed, conservative, and
careful — but bold. It reflects our brand-new team’s rapid convergence on
where we’re going and how we’ll get there."
Open source POWER ISA takes aim at Intel and Arm (TechRepublic)
TechRepublic reports
on the opening of the POWER instruction-set architecture. "While the
POWER ISA was itself licensable following the creation of the OpenPOWER
Foundation in 2013, that came at a cost. Now, the POWER ISA is available
royalty-free, inclusive of patent rights." The OpenPOWER Foundation
is also being folded into the Linux Foundation.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (flask), openSUSE (clementine, dkgpg, libTMCG, openexr, and zstd), Oracle (kernel, mysql:8.0, redis:5, and subversion:1.10), SUSE (nodejs6, python-Django, and rubygem-rails-html-sanitizer), and Ubuntu (cups, docker, docker-credential-helpers, kconfig, kde4libs, libreoffice, nova, and openldap).
[$] On-disk format robustness requirements for new filesystems
The "Extendable Read-Only File System" (or "EROFS") was first posted
by Gao Xiang in May 2018; it was merged into the staging tree for
the 4.19 release. There has been a steady stream of work on EROFS since
then, and its author now thinks that it is ready to move out of staging
and join the other official filesystems in the kernel. It would seem,
though, that there is one final hurdle that it may have to clear:
robustness in the face of a corrupted on-disk filesystem image. That
raises an interesting question: to what extent do new filesystems have to
exhibit a level of robustness that is not met by the filesystems that are
currently in heavy use?
Stapelberg: distri: a Linux distribution to research fast package management
Michael Stapelberg has announced
the first release of "distri", a distribution focused on simplifying and
accelerating package management. "distri’s package manager is extremely fast. Its main bottleneck is typically the network link, even at high speed links (I tested with a 100 Gbps link).
Its speed comes largely from an architecture which allows the package manager to do less work."
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel and openssl), Debian (ffmpeg, golang-1.11, imagemagick, kde4libs, openldap, and python3.4), Fedora (gradle, hostapd, kdelibs3, and mgetty), Gentoo (adobe-flash, hostapd, mariadb, patch, thunderbird, and vlc), Mageia (elfutils, mariadb, mythtv, postgresql, and redis), openSUSE (chromium, kernel, LibreOffice, and zypper, libzypp and libsolv), Oracle (ghostscript), Red Hat (rh-php71-php), SUSE (bzip2, evince, firefox, glib2, glibc, java-1_8_0-openjdk, polkit, postgresql10, python3, and squid), and Ubuntu (firefox).
A new chair for the openSUSE board
Richard Brown has announced that he is stepping down as the chair of the
openSUSE board. "I have absolute confidence in the openSUSE Board; Indeed, I don't think I
would be able to make this decision at this time if I wasn't certain that I
was leaving openSUSE in good hands.
On that note, SUSE has appointed Gerald Pfeifer as my replacement as
Chair. Gerald is SUSE's EMEA-based CTO, with a long history as a Tumbleweed
user, an active openSUSE Member, and upstream contributor/maintainer in
projects like GCC and Wine."
Kernel prepatch 5.3-rc5
Linus has released the 5.3-rc5 kernel
prepatch, saying: "It's been calm, and nothing here stands out, except perhaps some of
the VM noise where we un-reverted some changes wrt node-local vs
hugepage allocations."
Git v2.23.0 released
Version 2.23.0 of the Git source-code management system is out. There's a
lot of new features, including a new "git merge --quit" option,
new "git switch" and "git restore" commands, and more.
[$] Reconsidering unprivileged BPF
The BPF virtual machine within the kernel has seen a great deal of work
over the last few years; as that has happened, its use has expanded to many
different kernel subsystems. One of the objectives of that work in the
past has been
to make it safe to allow unprivileged users to load at least some types of
BPF programs into the kernel. A recent discussion has made it clear,
though, that the goal of opening up BPF to unprivileged users has been
abandoned as unachievable, and that further work in that direction will not
be accepted by the BPF maintainer.
kdevops: a devops framework for Linux kernel development
Luis Chamberlain has announced
the "kdevops" kernel-development framework. "I'm announcing the
release of kdevops which aims at making setting up and testing the Linux
kernel for any project as easy as possible. Note that setting up testing
for a subsystem and testing a subsystem are two separate operations,
however we strive for both. This is not a new test framework, it allows you
to use existing frameworks, and set those frameworks up as easily can
humanly be possible. It relies on a series of modern hip devops frameworks,
it relies on ansible, vagrant and terraform, ansible roles through the
Ansible Galaxy, and terraform modules."
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (freetype, libreoffice, and openjdk-7), Fedora (edk2, mariadb, mariadb-connector-c, mariadb-connector-odbc, python-django, and squirrelmail), Gentoo (chromium, cups, firefox, glibc, kconfig, libarchive, libreoffice, oracle-jdk-bin, polkit, proftpd, sqlite, wget, zeromq, and znc), openSUSE (bzip2, chromium, dosbox, evince, gpg2, icedtea-web, java-11-openjdk, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kconfig, kdelibs4, mariadb, mariadb-connector-c, nodejs8, pdns, polkit, python, subversion, and vlc), Oracle (ghostscript and kernel), Red Hat (mysql:8.0 and subversion:1.10), SUSE (389-ds, libvirt and libvirt-python, and openjpeg2), and Ubuntu (nginx).
KDE Applications 19.08 Brings New Features to Konsole, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Okular and Dozens of Other Apps (KDE.News)
KDE.News reports on the release of KDE Applications 19.08. The release has updates for many different applications, as can also be seen in the official announcement.
"Take Konsole, our powerful terminal emulator, which has seen major improvements to its tiling abilities. We've made tiling a bit more advanced, so now you can split your tabs as many times as you want, both horizontally and vertically. The layout is completely customizable, so feel free to drag and drop the panes inside Konsole to achieve the perfect workspace for your needs.
Dolphin, KDE's file explorer, introduces features that will help you step up your file management game. Let's start with bookmarks, a feature that allows you to create a quick-access link to a folder, or save a group of specific tabs for future reference. We've also made tab management smarter to help you declutter your desktop. Dolphin will now automatically open folders from other apps in new tabs of an existing window, instead of in their own separate windows."
[$] PHP and P++
PHP is the Fortran of the world-wide web: it demonstrated the power of code
embedded in web pages, but has since been superseded in many developers'
minds by more contemporary technologies. Even so, as with Fortran, there
is far more PHP code out there than one might think, and PHP is still
chosen for new projects. There is a certain amount of tension in the PHP
development community between the need to maintain compatibility for large
amounts of ancient code and the need to evolve the language to keep it
relevant for current developers. That tension has now come into the open
with a proposal to split PHP into two languages.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by openSUSE (irssi, ledger, libheimdal, libmediainfo, libqb, and libsass) and Slackware (mozilla).
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 15, 2019
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 15, 2019 is available.
[$] Hardening the "file" utility for Debian
The file
command would seem to be an ideal candidate for sandboxing; it routinely handles
untrusted input. But an effort to add seccomp()
filtering to file for Debian has run aground. The upstream file project has added
support for sandboxing via seccomp() but it does not play well
with other parts of the Debian world, package building in particular. This
situation
provides further evidence that seccomp() filtering is brittle and difficult to use.
EPEL 8.0 released
EPEL 8.0 is out.
"EPEL stands for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux and is a
subcommunity of the Fedora and CentOS projects aimed at bringing a
subset of packages out of Fedora releases ready to be used and
installed on various Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)."
Beyond the update to RHEL (and CentOS) 8, this release features a new
faster-moving
"playground" package stream and support for the s390 architecture.
Kroah-Hartman: Patch Workflow With Mutt - 2019
For those interested in the details of how one kernel developer works: Greg
Kroah-Hartman has documented
his email workflow in great detail. "The ability to edit a
single message directly within my email client is essential. I end up
having to fix up changelog text, editing the subject line to be correct,
fixing the mail headers to not do foolish things with text formats, and in
some cases, editing the patch itself for when it is corrupted or needs to
be fixed (I want a Linkedin skill badge for 'can edit diff files by hand
and have them still work')"
More in Tux Machines
- Highlights
- Front Page
- Latest Headlines
- Archive
- Recent comments
- All-Time Popular Stories
- Hot Topics
- New Members
Security: Sphinx, Ransomware, Webmin, YubiKey
| Android Leftovers
|
Analysis of the state of play of Open Source policies in EU Member States
The study on OSS policies will answer the following research questions, each of which will be elaborated upon in dedicated chapters: [...]
| Android Leftovers
|
.svg_.png)
Content (where original) is available under CC-BY-SA, copyrighted by original author/s.
Recent comments
12 hours 23 min ago
16 hours 52 min ago
17 hours 33 min ago
17 hours 36 min ago
18 hours 24 min ago
18 hours 46 min ago
20 hours 45 min ago
20 hours 47 min ago
1 day 7 hours ago
1 day 9 hours ago