~lwn | Bookmarks (354)

Security updates have been issued by Debian (distro-info-data), Fedora (libtiff), Mageia (firefox and oath-toolkit), Red Hat (krb5), and SUSE (openssl-1_1).

Small objects can lead to large email threads. In this case, the GNU C Library (glibc) community has been having an extensive debate over the handling of zero-byte allocations. Specifically, what should happen when a program calls realloc() specifying a size of zero? This is, it seems, a topic about which some people, at least, have strong feelings.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana, NetworkManager-libreswan, python3.11, and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Fedora (dotnet6.0, koji, python-fastapi, python-openapi-core, python-platformio, python-starlette, rust-pyo3, rust-pyo3-build-config, rust-pyo3-ffi, rust-pyo3-macros, rust-pyo3-macros-backend, and yarnpkg), Oracle (grafana, kernel, linux-firmware, NetworkManager-libreswan, and python3.11), Slackware (php81), and SUSE (apache2, buildah, cups-filters, go1.21-openssl, podman, postgresql16, python-pyOpenSSL, and webkit2gtk3).

Currently in Rust, there is no efficient and safe way to turn an array of bytes into a structure that corresponds to the array. Changing that was the topic of Jack Wrenn's talk this year at RustConf: "Safety Goggles for Alchemists". The goal is to be able to "transmute" — Rust's name for this kind of conversion — values into arbitrary user-defined types in...

Version 14.0 of the privacy-focused Tor browser has been released. This is our first stable release based on Firefox ESR 128, incorporating a year's worth of changes shipped upstream in Firefox. As part of this process we've also completed our annual ESR transition audit, where we reviewed and addressed over 200 Bugzilla issues for changes in Firefox that may negatively affect the privacy and...

Jakub Kadlčík announced on his blog that Fedora's Copr build system will be dropping support for building modules (groups of RPM packages that are built, installed, and shipped together) soon: The Fedora Modularity project never really took off, and building modules in Copr even less so. We've had only 14 builds in the last two years. It's not feasible to maintain the code for...

In July, at the GNOME annual general meeting (AGM), held at GUADEC 2024, the message from the GNOME Foundation board was that all was well, financially speaking. Not great, but the foundation was on a break-even budget and expected to go into its next fiscal year with a similar budget and headcount. On October 7, however, the board announced that it had had to make...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dmitry, libheif, and python-sql), Fedora (suricata and wireshark), SUSE (cargo-c, libeverest, protobuf, and qemu), and Ubuntu (golang-1.22, libheif, unbound, and webkit2gtk).

Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel's MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the patches@lists.linux.dev mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention. The explanation for the removal is simply "various compliance requirements". Given...

The Image-Based Linux Summit has by now established itself as a yearly event. Following on from last year's edition, the third edition was held in Berlin on September 24, the day before All Systems Go! 2024 (ASG). The purpose of this event is to gather stakeholders from various engineering groups and hold friendly but lively discussions around the topic of image-based Linux — that is, Linux...

The AlmaLinux project has introduced a new edition called "Kitten", which will serve as "the direct upstream for AlmaLinux OS and is the primary point for the AlmaLinux community to engage and influence the future of AlmaLinux OS". Not intended for production use, the first release is based on CentOS Stream 10 source, which will eventually be the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10:...

The 6.11.5, 6.6.58, 6.1.114, 5.15.169, and 5.10.228 stable kernels have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Version 3.4.0 of the OpenSSL SSL/TLS library has been released. It adds a number of new encryption algorithms, support for "directly fetched composite signature algorithms such as RSA-SHA2-256", and more. See the release notes for details.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, ghostscript, libsepol, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, perl, and python-sql), Oracle (389-ds-base, buildah, containernetworking-plugins, edk2, httpd, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, kernel, python-setuptools, skopeo, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (buildah), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (apache2, firefox, libopenssl-3-devel, podman, and python310-starlette), and Ubuntu (cups-browsed, firefox, libgsf, and linux-gke).

Sasha Levin has announced a new tree that is intended to perform continuous-integration tests of pull requests aimed at the mainline. The plan is for this tree to hold more finished work than sometimes ends up in linux-next; in a name that seems destined to create typographical confusion, it is called "linus-next". The linus-next tree aims to provide a more stable and testable integration...

Version 1.1.0 of the bootc utility for performing transactional, in-place operating system updates using Open Container Initative (OCI) images, has been released. This release "officially stabilizes all APIs" for bootc and includes a number of bug fixes. LWN covered bootc in June.

Sigstore is a project that is meant to simplify and improve the process of signing, verifying, and protecting software. It is a relatively new project, declared "generally available" in 2022. Python is an early adopter of sigstore; it started providing signatures for CPython artifacts with Python 3.11 in 2022. This is in addition to the OpenPGP signatures it has been providing since at least 2001. Now, Seth Michael Larson—the...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk, chromium, php-horde-mime-viewer, and php-horde-turba), Fedora (apache-commons-io, buildah, chromium, containers-common, libarchive, libdigidocpp, oath-toolkit, podman, rust-hyper-rustls, rust-reqwest, rust-rustls-native-certs, rust-rustls-native-certs0.7, rust-tonic, rust-tonic-build, rust-tonic-types, rust-tower, rust-tower-http, rust-tower-http0.5, rust-tower0.4, thunderbird, and unbound), SUSE (buildah, chromedriver, chromium, element-desktop, element-web, jetty-annotations, nodejs-electron, php7, php74, php8, podman, python3-virtualbox, qemu, thunderbird, and valkey), and Ubuntu (amd64-microcode).

The Guix project has disclosed a security vulnerability in the build daemon that the distribution uses to build and install software locally. The vulnerability allows an existing unprivileged user to get access to a setuid binary, and from there potentially interfere with any other software built or installed on the computer. The project recommends upgrading the guix daemon now, to avoid the issue. This...

Linus has released 6.12-rc4 for testing. "I'm not happy with how big this is - it's probably far from the biggest rc4 ever, but it _is_ the biggest rc4 we've had in the 6.x series at least in number of commits."

The kernel's CPU scheduler currently offers several preemption modes that implement a range of tradeoffs between system throughput and response time. Back in September 2023, a discussion on scheduling led to the concept of "lazy preemption", which could simplify scheduling in the kernel while providing better results. Things went quiet for a while, but lazy preemption has returned in the form of this patch...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (apache2), Red Hat (expat), SUSE (cups-filters, jetty-minimal, OpenIPMI, and python-starlette), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, and oath-toolkit).

Version 1.82.0 of the Rust language has been released. There are a lot of new features this time, including a cargo info command, tier-1 support for 64-bit Apple Arm systems, a new native syntax (&raw) to create raw pointers, changes to unsafe extern, unsafe attributes, standardized rules around the handling of floating-point not-a-number values, and more.