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Updated: 10 min 49 sec ago
Monday 21st of December 2020 07:49:11 PM
Predictions are hard, as they say, especially when they are about the
future. So perhaps your editor can be forgiven for not anticipating that
2020 would be the sort of year that makes one think nostalgically about
trips to the dentist, waiting in a crowded motor-vehicle office, or
crossing the Pacific in a row-47 middle seat. If only we had known how
good we had it. Be that as it may, this year is finally coming to an end.
Read on for a look back at the year, starting with the
ill-advised predictions made in January.
Monday 21st of December 2020 04:15:43 PM
Stable kernels
5.10.2,
5.9.16, and
5.4.85 have been released with important
fixes. This is the last 5.9.y kernel, users should move to 5.10.y at this
time.
Monday 21st of December 2020 03:57:51 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl, influxdb, lxml, node-ini, php-pear, and postsrsd), Fedora (chromium, curl, firefox, matrix-synapse, mingw-jasper, phpldapadmin, and thunderbird), Mageia (openjpeg2), openSUSE (gcc7, openssh, PackageKit, python-urllib3, slurm_18_08, and webkit2gtk3), Oracle (fapolicydbug, firefox, nginx:1.16, nodejs:12, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libpq, openssl, and thunderbird), and SUSE (curl, firefox, openssh, ovmf, slurm_17_11, slurm_18_08, slurm_20_02, and xen).
Saturday 19th of December 2020 10:29:58 PM
Karsten Wade, who has served on the CentOS board among other things, has
posted
a
blog entry on the CentOS change and its effects on users.
"Providing our community with a solid, reliable distro that is good-enough for your workloads is a strong part of the CentOS brand. We’re confident that CentOS Stream can do this.
And while I’m certain now that CentOS Linux cannot do what CentOS Stream
can to solve the openness gap, I am confident that CentOS Stream can cover
95% (or so) of current user workloads stuck on the various sides of the
availability gap. I believe that Red Hat will make solutions available as
well that can cover other sides of the gap without too much user heartburn
in the end." He is asking for input on what those solutions should
look like.
Friday 18th of December 2020 08:42:24 PM
When Linus Torvalds
released
the 5.10 kernel, he noted that the 5.11 merge window would run up
against the holidays. He indicated strongly that maintainers should send
him pull requests early as a result. Maintainers appear to have listened;
over 10,000 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline in the first
three days of the 5.11 merge window. Read on for a summary of the most
significant changes in that flood of patches.
Friday 18th of December 2020 02:07:39 PM
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (blueman, chromium, gdk-pixbuf2, hostapd, lib32-gdk-pixbuf2, minidlna, nsd, pam, and unbound), CentOS (gd, openssl, pacemaker, python-rtslib, samba, and targetcli), Debian (kernel, lxml, and mediawiki), Fedora (mbedtls), openSUSE (clamav and openssl-1_0_0), Oracle (firefox and openssl), Red Hat (openssl, postgresql:12, postgresql:9.6, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (openssl and thunderbird), and SUSE (cyrus-sasl, openssh, slurm_18_08, and webkit2gtk3).
Thursday 17th of December 2020 07:04:27 PM
Device drivers usually live within a single kernel subsystem. Sometimes,
however, developers need to handle functionalities outside of this model.
Consider, for example, a network interface card (NIC) exposing both Ethernet and
RDMA functionalities. There is one hardware block, but two drivers for the
two functions. Those drivers need to work within their respective
subsystems, but they must also share access to the same hardware. There is
no standard way in current kernels to connect those drivers together, so
developers invent ad-hoc methods to handle the interaction between
them. Recently, Dave Ertman
posted
a patch set introducing a new type of a bus, called the "auxiliary bus", to
address this problem.
Thursday 17th of December 2020 02:21:29 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, sympa, thunderbird, tomcat8, and xerces-c), Fedora (fprintd, kernel, libfprint, and synergy), Mageia (bitcoin, dpic, firefox, jasper, jupyter-notebook, sam2p, thunderbird, and x11-server), Oracle (firefox, gd, kernel, net-snmp, openssl, python-rtslib, samba, and targetcli), Red Hat (fapolicyd, openshift, Red Hat Virtualization, and web-admin-build), SUSE (xen), and Ubuntu (unzip).
Thursday 17th of December 2020 12:50:16 AM
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for December 17, 2020 is available.
Wednesday 16th of December 2020 07:34:22 PM
Python, at least in the CPython reference implementation, is not a
particularly speedy language. That is not at all
surprising to anyone who has used it—the language is optimized for
understandability and development speed, instead. There have been lots of
efforts over the years to speed up various parts of the interpreter,
compiler, and virtual-machine bytecode execution, though no comprehensive
overhaul has been merged into CPython. An interesting new proposal could
perhaps change that, though it is unclear at this point if
it will take off.
Wednesday 16th of December 2020 04:35:54 PM
Stable kernels
5.9.15 and
5.4.84 have been released. They both contain
important fixes and users should upgrade.
Wednesday 16th of December 2020 04:30:17 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr), Fedora (mingw-openjpeg2, openjpeg2, and synergy), openSUSE (audacity and gdm), Oracle (libexif, libpq, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, gnutls, go-toolset:rhel8, java-1.7.1-ibm, java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, kernel-rt, linux-firmware, mariadb-connector-c, mariadb:10.3, memcached, net-snmp, nginx:1.16, nodejs:12, openssl, pacemaker, postgresql:10, python-django-horizon, python-XStatic-Bootstrap-SCSS, python-XStatic-jQuery, and python-XStatic-jQuery224), Scientific Linux (gd, kernel, pacemaker, python-rtslib, samba, and targetcli), SUSE (openssh, PackageKit, spice, and spice-gtk), and Ubuntu (firefox and imagemagick).
Wednesday 16th of December 2020 03:24:49 PM
Hans Petter Jansson has done
an
analysis of contributions to the GNOME project, raising some concerns
about how well the project is doing at bringing in new developers for the
long haul. "According to this, GNOME peaked at slightly above 1,400
contributors in 2010 and went into decline with the GNOME 3.0 release the
following year. However, 2020 saw the most contributors in a long time,
even with preliminary data — there’s still two weeks to go. Who knows if
it’s an anomaly or not. It’s been an atypical year across the
board."
Tuesday 15th of December 2020 07:45:31 PM
On November 26, version 6.1 of
GNU Octave, a language and
environment for numerical computing, was
released. There are several new
features and enhancements in this release, including improvements to
graphics output, better communication with web services, and over 40 new
functions. We will take a look at where Octave fits into the landscape of
numerical tools for scientists and engineers, and recount some of its long
history.
Tuesday 15th of December 2020 05:19:32 PM
Firefox 84.0 has been released. This version includes an accelerated
rendering pipeline for Linux/GNOME/X11 users and improved performance and
compatibility with Docker. This is the final release to support Adobe
Flash. The
release notes
have additional details.
Firefox 78.6.0 ESR has also been released, with various stability,
functionality, and security fixes. See the release
notes for more information.
Tuesday 15th of December 2020 04:42:51 PM
CloudLinux has put out a press release stating that it will commit over
$1 million per year toward the creation and maintenance of a CentOS
replacement distribution. "CloudLinux is sponsoring Project Lenix, which will create a free, open-source, community-driven,
1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). It will provide an uninterrupted way to
convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime. Entire server fleets will be able to
be converted with a single command with no reinstallation and no reboots required."
Tuesday 15th of December 2020 04:13:55 PM
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxstream-java and xen), Fedora (curl), openSUSE (curl, kernel, mariadb, and openssl-1_1), Oracle (kernel, libexif, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (curl, gd, kernel, kernel-rt, linux-firmware, net-snmp, openssl, pacemaker, python-rtslib, samba, targetcli, and xorg-x11-server), Scientific Linux (libexif, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), and SUSE (clamav, gdm, and kernel).
Monday 14th of December 2020 08:46:10 PM
Linus Torvalds
released
the 5.10 kernel on December 13 at the end of a typical nine-week development cycle.
At that point, 16,174 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the
mainline; that makes 5.10 a larger cycle than 5.9, but it falls just short
of the record set by 5.8, which ended with 16,308 changesets. For the most
part 5.10 is just
another routine kernel release, but there are a couple of interesting
things to be seen in the overall statistics.
Monday 14th of December 2020 08:32:16 PM
The
5.10.1 stable kernel update has been
released on an expedited schedule; it contains reverts for a couple of
late-arriving 5.10 patches that turned out not to be as good an idea as it
first seemed.
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