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 31 min ago
[$] Lockdown as a security module
Technologies like UEFI secure boot are intended to guarantee that a
locked-down system is running the software intended by its owner (for a
definition of "owner" as "whoever holds the signing key recognized by the
firmware"). That guarantee is hard to uphold, though, if a program run on
the system in question is able to modify the running kernel somehow. Thus,
proponents of secure-boot technologies have been trying for years to
provide the ability to lock
down many types of kernel functionality on secure systems. The latest
attempt posted by Matthew Garrett, at an eyebrow-raising version 34,
tries to address previous concerns by putting lockdown under the control of
a Linux security module (LSM).
Canonical backtracks on i386 packages
Canonical has let
it be known that minds have been changed about removing all 32-bit x86
support from the Ubuntu distribution. "Thanks to the huge amount of feedback this weekend from gamers, Ubuntu Studio, and the WINE community, we will change our plan and build selected 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS.
We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed."
Two years of postmarketOS
PostmarketOS is an Alpine Linux based operating system for mobile
devices. The postmarketOS blog takes a look
at the project after two years of development. "Wouldn't it be great if you could take any obsolete smartphone from the past ten years and replace its outdated and insecure software with a maintained, modular free software stack? How about then using it as a Raspberry Pi-like device for your next tinkering project? With some constraints, postmarketOS makes this possible today for 139 booting devices. Every single package in the whole OS can be updated, with the only exceptions being the vendor's Linux kernel and firmware blobs (if you plan on using them). In a few cases, it is even possible to switch out the discontinued vendor kernel forks with the upstream kernel releases straight from Linus Torvalds."
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (jackson-databind, libvirt, pdns, and vim), Fedora (evince, firefox, gjs, libxslt, mozjs60, and poppler), openSUSE (dbus-1, firefox, ImageMagick, netpbm, openssh, and thunderbird), Oracle (libssh2, libvirt, and python), Scientific Linux (python), SUSE (compat-openssl098 , dbus-1 , evince , exempi , firefox , glib2 , gstreamer-0_10-plugins-base , gstreamer-plugins-base , java-1_8_0-ibm , libssh2_org , libvirt , netpbm , samba , SDL2 , sqlite3 , thunderbird , and wireshark ), and Ubuntu (web2py).
Kernel prepatch 5.2-rc6
The 5.2-rc6 kernel prepatch has been
released. Linus worries that the volume of changes has increased — but not
too much. "With all that out of the way, I'm still reasonably
optimistic that we're on track for a calm final part of the release, and I
don't think there is anything particularly bad on the horizon." He
also notes that, due to travel, he'll be releasing 5.2-rc7 later than
usual.
[$] FreeBSD turns 26
The FreeBSD operating system is continuing
to make progress, 26 years after it got its name. Among the areas where
work is being done is on
improved support for RISC-V, FUSE
filesystem updates, C runtime changes, and security improvements. FreeBSD
Day is celebrated on June 19, in recognition of the date in 1993 when
the name FreeBSD was coined for
a fork of the 386BSD project. The first official release
of FreeBSD did not occur until November 1, 1993, however.
Ahead of FreeBSD Day, the project released its quarterly report for the first quarter of 2019, outlining some of its ongoing efforts. In addition to the quarterly report, the executive director of the FreeBSD Foundation provided LWN with some insights into the state of the project and the foundation that supports it.
[$] Statistics from the 5.2 kernel — and before
As of this writing, just over 13,600 non-merge changesets have been pulled
into the mainline repository for the 5.2 development cycle. The time has
come, once again, for a look at where that work came from and who supported
it. There are some unique aspects to 5.2 that have thrown off some of the
usual numbers.
Huang: Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War
Bunnie Huang writes
about the escalating trade wars and how they could be harmful to the
open-source community. "Because the administrative action so far
against Huawei relies only upon export license restrictions, the Linux
Foundation has been able to find shelter under a license exemption for open
source software. However, should Huawei be designated as a 'foreign
adversary' under EO13873, it greatly expands the scope of the ban because
it prohibits transactions with entities under the direction or influence of
foreign adversaries. The executive order also broadly includes any
information technology including hardware and software with no exemption
for open source."
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (libvirt and python), Debian (intel-microcode, php-horde-form, and znc), Fedora (firefox), Mageia (firefox, flash-player-plugin, git, graphicsmagick, kernel, kernel-linus, kernel-tmb, phpmyadmin, and thunderbird), Oracle (libssh2, libvirt, and python), Red Hat (libvirt and python), Scientific Linux (libvirt), Slackware (bind and mozilla), SUSE (enigmail), and Ubuntu (bind9, intel-microcode, mosquitto, postgresql-10, postgresql-11, and thunderbird).
[$] C, Fortran, and single-character strings
The calling interfaces between programming languages are, by their nature,
ripe for misunderstandings; different languages can have subtly different
ideas of how data should be passed around. Such misunderstandings often
have the effect of making things break right away; these are quickly
fixed. Others can persist for years or even decades before jumping out of
the shadows and making things fail. A problem of the latter variety
recently turned up in how some C programs are passing strings to Fortran
subroutines, with unpleasant effects on widely used packages like LAPACK.
Kubernetes 1.15 released
The Kubernetes container orchestrator team has announced the release of Kubernetes 1.15; the main themes of this release are "extensibility and continuous improvement". One of the focus areas was on usability and lifecycle stability for clusters:
"Work on making Kubernetes installation, upgrade and configuration even more robust has been a major focus for this cycle for SIG Cluster Lifecycle (see our last Community Update). Bug fixes across bare metal tooling and production-ready user stories, such as the high availability use cases have been given priority for 1.15.
kubeadm, the cluster lifecycle building block, continues to receive features and stability work required for bootstrapping production clusters efficiently. kubeadm has promoted high availability (HA) capability to beta, allowing users to use the familiar kubeadm init and kubeadm join commands to configure and deploy an HA control plane. An entire new test suite has been created specifically for ensuring these features will stay stable over time."
More information can be found in the
release notes.
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, gvfs, intel-microcode, and python-urllib3), Fedora (advancecomp, firefox, freeradius, kubernetes, pam-u2f, and rubygem-jquery-ui-rails), openSUSE (elfutils and sssd), Red Hat (chromium-browser), SUSE (doxygen and samba), and Ubuntu (evince, firefox, Gunicorn, libvirt, and sqlite3).
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 20, 2019
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 20, 2019 is available.
[$] The TCP SACK panic
Selective
acknowledgment (SACK) is a technique used by TCP to help alleviate
congestion
that can arise due to the retransmission of dropped packets. It allows
the endpoints to describe which pieces of the data they have received,
so that only the missing pieces need to be retransmitted. However, a bug
was recently found in the Linux implementation of SACK that allows remote
attackers to panic the system by sending crafted SACK information.
Ubuntu dropping i386 support
Starting with the upcoming "Eoan Ermine" (a.k.a. 19.10) release, the Ubuntu
distribution will
not support 32-bit x86 systems. "The Ubuntu engineering team has
reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to
carry i386 forward as an architecture. Consequently, i386 will not be
included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly
begin the process of disabling it for the eoan series across Ubuntu
infrastructure."
Alpine Linux 3.10.0 released
Version
3.10.0 of the Alpine Linux distribution is out. It includes a switch
to the iwd WiFi management daemon, support
for the ceph filesystem, the lightdm display manager, and more.
[$] More frequent Python releases?
Python has followed an 18-month release cycle for many years now; each
new 3.x release comes at that frequency. It has worked well, overall,
but there is interest in having a shorter cycle, which would mean that new
features get into users' hands more quickly. But changing that longstanding
cycle has implications in many different places, some of which have come up
as part of a discussion on switching to a cycle of a different length.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (dbus, firefox, kernel, linux-lts, linux-zen, and python), CentOS (bind and kernel), Debian (firefox-esr, glib2.0, and vim), Fedora (dbus, kernel, kernel-headers, mingw-libxslt, poppler, and python-gnupg), openSUSE (gnome-shell, kernel, libcroco, php7, postgresql10, python, sssd, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel and libvirt), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8, gvfs, java-11-openjdk, pki-deps:10.6, systemd, and WALinuxAgent), SUSE (docker, kernel, libvirt, openssl, openssl1, and python-Jinja2), and Ubuntu (samba).
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today's howtos
| 5 Best and Free Desktop Email Clients for Linux and Windows
If you are looking for free Email clients for Linux and Windows – here are 5 of them we list which you can try and consider for casual or professional uses.
Web based email is popular today which can be accessed via browser or mobile apps. However, big and medium enterprises, generic users still prefers native desktop email clients for heavy and office uses. Microsoft Outlook is the most popular desktop email client which is of course not free and you have to pay huge licence fee to use.
There are multiple options for free desktop email clients available. Here are the best 5 free and open source email clients which you can go ahead and try then deploy for your needs.
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On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31
So I hope everyone is enjoying Fedora Workstation 30, but we don’t rest on our laurels here so I thought I share some of things we are working on for Fedora Workstation 31. This is not an exhaustive list, but some of the more major items we are working on.
Wayland – Our primary focus is still on finishing the Wayland transition and we feel we are getting close now, and thank you to the community for their help in testing and verifying Wayland over the last few years. The single biggest goal currently is fully removing our X Windowing System dependency, meaning that GNOME Shell should be able to run without needing XWayland. For those wondering why that has taken so much time, well it is simple; for 20 years developers could safely assume we where running atop of X. So refactoring everything needed to remove any code that makes the assumption that it is running on top of X.org has been a major effort. The work is mostly done now for the shell itself, but there are a few items left in regards to the GNOME Setting daemon where we need to expel the X dependency. Olivier Fourdan is working on removing those settings daemon bits as part of his work to improve the Wayland accessibility support. We are optimistic that can declare this work done within a GNOME release or two. So GNOME 3.34 or maybe 3.36. Once that work is complete an X server (XWayland) would only be started if you actually run a X application and when you shut that application down the X server will be shut down too.
| Videos: OpenMandriva Lx 4.0, Enso OS 0.3.1, OpenShift and Upbound
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