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Version 9.5 of the Rocky Linux distribution is out. As with the AlmaLinux 9.5 release, Rocky Linux 9.5 tracks the changes in upstream RHEL 9.5. See the release notes for details.

It took more than 20 years, but the FreeCAD computer-aided design project has just made its 1.0 release. Since the very beginnings, the FreeCAD community had a clear view of what 1.0 represented for us. What we wanted in it. FreeCAD matured over the years, and that list narrowed down to just two major remaining pieces: fixing the toponaming problem, and having a built-in...

The most common piece of advice given to users who ask about running their own mail server is don't. Setting up and securing a mail server in 2024 is not for the faint of heart, nor for anyone without copious spare time. Spammers want to flood inboxes with ads for questionable supplements, attackers want to abuse servers to send spam (or worse), and getting the...

Version 6.7 of the Incus container-management system (forked from LXD) has been released. "This is another one of those pretty well rounded releases with new features and improvements for everyone". New features include automatic cluster rebalancing, DHCP improvements, and more.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0, bcc, bluez, bpftrace, bubblewrap, flatpak, buildah, cockpit, containernetworking-plugins, cups, cyrus-imapd, edk2, expat, firefox, fontforge, gnome-shell, gnome-shell-extensions, grafana, grafana-pcp, gtk3, httpd, iperf3, jose, krb5, libgcrypt, libsoup, libvirt, libvpx, lldpd, microcode_ctl, mingw-glib2, mod_auth_openidc, nano, NetworkManager, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, openexr, osbuild-composer, pcp, podman, poppler, postfix, python-dns, python-jinja2, python-jwcrypto, python3.11, python3.11-PyMySQL, python3.11-urllib3, python3.12, python3.12-PyMySQL, python3.12-urllib3, python3.9, qemu-kvm, runc, skopeo, squid, thunderbird,...

Version 9.5 of the AlmaLinux enterprise-oriented distribution has been released. AlmaLinux 9.5 aims to improve performance, development tooling, and security. Updated module streams offer better support for web applications. New versions of compilers provide access to the latest features and optimizations that improve performance and enable better code generation. The release also introduces improvements to system performance monitoring, visualization, and system performance data collecting.

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced the release of a security audit report conducted by security firm Synacktiv. The audit uncovered a number of vulnerabilities: Most of these vulnerabilities have been addressed through official FreeBSD Project security advisories, which offer detailed information about each vulnerability, its impact, and the measures implemented to improve the security of FreeBSD systems. [...] The audit uncovered 27 vulnerabilities and...

Linus Torvalds released the 6.12 kernel on November 17, as expected. This development cycle, the last for 2024, brought 13,344 non-merge changesets into the mainline kernel; that made it a relatively slow cycle from this perspective, but 6.12 includes a long list of significant new features. The time has come to look at where those changes came from, and to look at the year-long LTS...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (binutils, libsoup, squid:4, tigervnc, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (icinga2, postgresql-13, postgresql-15, smarty3, symfony, thunderbird, and waitress), Fedora (dotnet9.0, ghostscript, microcode_ctl, php-bartlett-PHP-CompatInfo, python-waitress, and webkitgtk), Gentoo (Perl, Pillow, and X.Org X server, XWayland), Oracle (binutils, cups-filters, giflib, squid, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (webkit2gtk3), SUSE (ansible-core, apache2, gio-branding-upstream, icinga2, kernel-devel, libnghttp2-14, libsoup-2_4-1, libsoup-3_0-0, libvirt, nodejs-electron, postgresql13, postgresql16, python39, rclone, thunderbird,...

Linus has released the 6.12 kernel. "No strange surprises this last week, so we're sticking to the regular release schedule, and that obviously means that the merge window opens tomorrow.". Headline features in this release include: support for the Arm permission overlay extension, better compile-time control over which Spectre mitigations to employ, the last pieces of realtime preemption support, the realtime deadline server mechanism,...

The 6.11.9, 6.6.62, 6.1.118, 5.15.173, 5.10.230, 5.4.286, and 4.19.324 stable kernels have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

The OpenWrt router-oriented distribution has long used its own opkg package manager. The project has just announced, though, that future releases will use the apk package manager from Alpine Linux instead. "This new package manager offers a number of advantages over the older opkg system and is a significant milestone in the development of the OpenWrt platform. The older opkg package manager has been...

The kernel's loadable-module facility allows code to be loaded into (and sometimes removed from) a running kernel. Among other things, loadable modules make it possible to run a kernel with only the subsystems needed for the system's hardware and workload. Loadable modules can also make it easy for out-of-tree code to access parts of the kernel that developers would prefer to keep private; this...

The Fedora Project is set to welcome a second desktop edition to its lineup after months (or years, depending when one starts the clock) of discussions. The project recently decided to allow a new working group to move forward with a KDE Plasma Desktop edition that will sit alongside the existing GNOME-based Fedora Workstation edition. This puts KDE on a more equal footing within the project, which,...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl and unbound), Fedora (krb5 and microcode_ctl), Red Hat (kernel and kernel-rt), SUSE (glib2, python3-wxPython, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (golang-1.17, golang-1.18, libgd2, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-gke, linux-raspi, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, and php7.0, php7.2).

The Python Package Index (PyPI) has announced that it has finalized support for PEP 740 ("Index support for digital attestations"). Trail of Bits, which performed much of the development work for the implementation, has an in-depth blog post about the work and its adoption, as well as what is left undone: One thing is notably missing from all of this work: downstream verification. [...]...

Direct memory access (DMA) I/O is simple in concept: a peripheral device moves data directly to or from memory while the CPU is busy doing other things. As is so often the case, DMA is rather more complicated in practice, and the kernel has developed a complicated internal API to support it. It turns out that the DMA API, as it exists now, can...

A new batch of stable kernels has just been released: 6.11.8, 6.6.61, 6.1.117, and 5.15.172. As usual, they contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (llama-cpp, mingw-expat, python3.6, webkit2gtk4.0, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Mageia (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, java-21-openjdk & java-latest-openjdk and libarchive), Oracle (expat, gstreamer1-plugins-base, kernel, libsoup, podman, and tigervnc), SUSE (buildah, java-1_8_0-openjdk, and switchboard-plug-bluetooth), and Ubuntu (zlib).

Programming language polyglots are files that are valid programs in multiple languages, and do different things in each. While polyglots are normally nothing more than a curiosity, the Cosmopolitan Libc project has been trying to put them to a novel use: producing native, multi-platform binaries that run directly on several operating systems and architectures. There are still some rough edges with the project's approach,...

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (expat), Fedora (chromium and golang-github-nvidia-container-toolkit), Mageia (curl, expat, mpg123, networkmanager-libreswan, openssl, php-tcpdf, qbittorrent, and x11-server, x11-server-xwayland, and tigervnc), Red Hat (kernel and libsoup), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (firefox, kernel, python-PyPDF2, and xen), and Ubuntu (dotnet9, ghostscript, linux-aws, linux-oem-6.8, and pydantic).

Over the years, there has been steady progress in adding security features to compilers and other tools to assist with hardening the Linux kernel (and, of course, other programs). In something of a tradition in the toolchains track at the Linux Plumbers Conference, Kees Cook and Qing Zhao have led a session on that progress and further plans; this year, they were joined by...

Garrett LeSage has written an in-depth article for Fedora Magazine about a new web-based user interface (UI) for Fedora's Anaconda installer, planned to ship with Fedora 42. The article looks at the rationale for moving from GTK 3 to a web-based UI, provides a number of screenshots and demo screencasts, as well as instructions on trying out the new installer with Fedora Rawhide.