Linux Weekly News

Please welcome Daroc Alden

2 hónap 1 hét óta
When, at the beginning of November, we posted an open position at LWN, we were only so hopeful; experience has shown that finding writers who are both capable of and interested in writing our sort of material is a challenging task. This time, though, hope was justified: we got a surprising number of applications from highly qualified applicants. The hardest part of the task has, instead, been narrowing down the choice to a hiring decision.

We are pleased to announce that Daroc Alden has just joined LWN's staff. Daroc is a programmer from New England, where they live with their spouse and their cat. They graduated with a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire. In their spare time, they enjoy fiction writing and musicals. They are especially interested in programming language theory and implementation.

Daroc will be taking on some of the load of keeping LWN interesting while helping us to expand our content mix in the areas that our readers are interested in. Please give them your support as they come up to speed within our operation. We are looking forward to having Daroc as part of a reinforced and more energetic LWN going forward.

corbet

Kicinski: netdev in 2023

2 hónap 1 hét óta
Networking maintainer Jakub Kicinski (along with several collaborators) has put up a summary of what happened in the kernel's network stack during 2023.

Throughout those releases netdev patch handlers (DaveM, Jakub, Paolo) applied 7243 patches, and the resulting pull requests to Linus described the changes in 6398 words. Given the volume of work we cannot go over every improvement, or even cover networking sub-trees in much detail (BPF enhancements… wireless work on WiFi 7…). We instead try to focus on major themes, and developments we subjectively find interesting.

corbet

Security updates for Wednesday

2 hónap 1 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (zabbix), Gentoo (OpenJDK), Red Hat (kernel), Slackware (gnutls and xorg), SUSE (cloud-init, kernel, xorg-x11-server, and xwayland), and Ubuntu (freeimage, postgresql-10, and xorg-server, xwayland).
corbet

[$] Julia v1.10: Performance, a new parser, and more

2 hónap 1 hét óta
The new year arrived bearing a new version of Julia, a general-purpose, open-source programming language with a focus on high-performance scientific computing. Some of Julia's unusual features are Lisp-inspired metaprogramming, the ability to examine compiled representations of code in the REPL or in a "reactive notebook", an advanced type and dispatch system, and a sophisticated, built-in package manager. Version 1.10 brings big increases in speed and developer convenience, especially improvements in code precompilation and loading times. It also features a new parser written in Julia.
jake

Wine 9.0 released

2 hónap 1 hét óta
Version 9.0 of the Wine Windows-compatibility system has been released. "This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed below. The main highlights are the new WoW64 architecture and the experimental Wayland driver."
corbet

A glitch in the merge window

2 hónap 1 hét óta
On January 13, Linus Torvalds let it be known that he had lost power due to the bad weather in the US Pacific Northwest. As of this writing, he has not yet resurfaced, so the 6.8 merge window has ground to a halt.

There's apparently about 100k people without power, and I doubt our neighborhood is the priority, so I expect to be without power for some time still. I hope I'm wrong, but a few years ago it took more than a week to restore power due to all the downed trees. It's hopefully nowhere near that, but..

corbet

Security updates for Tuesday

2 hónap 1 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by Gentoo (KTextEditor, libspf2, libuv, and Nettle), Mageia (hplip), Oracle (container-tools:4.0, gnutls, idm:DL1, squid, squid34, and virt:ol, virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, krb5, python3, rsync, and sqlite), SUSE (chromium, perl-Spreadsheet-ParseXLSX, postgresql, postgresql15, postgresql16, and rubygem-actionpack-5_1), and Ubuntu (binutils, libspf2, libssh2, mysql-5.7, w3m, webkit2gtk, and xerces-c).
corbet

OpenSUSE Leap 16 is coming

2 hónap 2 hét óta
The openSUSE project has confirmed that there will be a successor to openSUSE Leap 15, but is not sharing a lot of details at this point.

The transition to Leap 16 is not just a numerical step-up but symbolizes a significant path forward in technology and user experiences. The future of openSUSE Leap is based on the innovative concept of SUSE’s Adaptable Linux Platform.

The Adaptable Linux Platform powers the next-generation openSUSE Leap, Leap Micro, and SUSE solutions. It makes distributions more adaptable and suitable for cloud-native workloads while also being capable of handling a rapid pace of innovation.

corbet

Stawinski: How We Executed a Critical Supply Chain Attack on PyTorch

2 hónap 2 hét óta
John Stawinski IV describes, in detail, how he and a partner were able to compromise the security of the heavily used PyTorch project.

Our exploit path resulted in the ability to upload malicious PyTorch releases to GitHub, upload releases to AWS, potentially add code to the main repository branch, backdoor PyTorch dependencies – the list goes on. In short, it was bad. Quite bad.

As we’ve seen before with SolarWinds, Ledger, and others, supply chain attacks like this are killer from an attacker’s perspective. With this level of access, any respectable nation-state would have several paths to a PyTorch supply chain compromise.

corbet

[$] Rust and C filesystem APIs

2 hónap 2 hét óta
As the Rust-for-Linux project advances, the kernel is gradually accumulating abstraction layers that enable Rust code to interface with the existing C code. As the discussion around the set of filesystem abstractions posted by Wedson Almeida Filho in December shows, though, there is some tension between two approaches to the design of those abstractions. The approach favored by most of the kernel's C programmers looks set to win out, but this is a discussion that is likely to return as the use of Rust in the kernel grows.
corbet

Security updates for Monday

2 hónap 2 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (bind, cups, curl, firefox, ipa, iperf3, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, kernel, libssh2, linux-firmware, open-vm-tools, openssh, postgresql, python, python3, squid, thunderbird, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server), Fedora (chromium, python-flask-security-too, and tkimg), Gentoo (libgit2, Opera, QPDF, and zlib), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, gnutls, openssh, packages, and vlc), Oracle (.NET 6.0, fence-agents, frr, ipa, kernel, nss, pixman, and tomcat), and SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-bad).
jake

[$] The first half of the 6.8 merge window

2 hónap 2 hét óta
The 6.8 merge window has gotten off to a relatively slow start; reasons for that include a significant scheduler performance regression that Linus Torvalds stumbled into and has spent time tracking down. Even so, 4,282 non-merge changesets have found their way into the mainline repository for the 6.8 release as of this writing. These commits have brought a number of significant changes and new features.
corbet

Information on the SourceHut outage

2 hónap 2 hét óta
Users of SourceHut will have noticed that the site has been unreachable; Drew DeVault has now posted a report on what is happening (it's a distributed denial-of-service attack) and what is being done to recover.

We deal with ordinary DDoS attacks in the normal course of operations, and we are generally able to mitigate them on our end. However, this is not an ordinary DDoS attack; the attacker posesses considerable resources and is operating at a scale beyond that which we have the means to mitigate ourselves. In response, before we could do much ourselves to understand or mitigate the problem, our upstream network provider null routed SourceHut entirely, rendering both the internet at large, and SourceHut staff, unable to reach our servers.

corbet

Security updates for Friday

2 hónap 2 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, linux-5.10, php-phpseclib, php-phpseclib3, and phpseclib), Fedora (openssh and tinyxml), Gentoo (FreeRDP and Prometheus SNMP Exporter), Mageia (packages), Red Hat (openssl), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-rs and python-django-grappelli), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet7, dotnet8, openssh, and xerces-c).
jake

OpenSSH announces DSA-removal timeline

2 hónap 2 hét óta
For those of you still using DSA keys with SSH: the project has announced its plans to remove support for that algorithm around the beginning of 2025.

The only remaining use of DSA at this point should be deeply legacy devices. As such, we no longer consider the costs of maintaining DSA in OpenSSH to be justified. Moreover, we hope that OpenSSH's final removal of this insecure algorithm accelerates its deprecation in other SSH implementations and allows maintainers of cryptography libraries to remove it too.

corbet

[$] The kernel "closure" API

2 hónap 2 hét óta
The data structure known as a "closure" first found its way into the mainline kernel with the addition of bcache in the 3.10 development cycle. With the advent of bcachefs in 6.7, though, it acquired a second user and was moved to the kernel's lib directory, making it available to other kernel users as well. The documentation of closures in the source is better than that of many things in the kernel, but there is still room for a gentler introduction.
corbet

Security updates for Thursday

2 hónap 2 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium), Fedora (chromium, python-paramiko, tigervnc, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (ipa, libxml2, python-urllib3, python3, and squid), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, .NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, container-tools:4.0, fence-agents, frr, gnutls, idm:DL1, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, libarchive, libxml2, nss, openssl, pixman, python-urllib3, python3, tigervnc, tomcat, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel modules), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-bad), and Ubuntu (firefox, Go, linux-aws, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-iot, linux-oem-6.1, and twisted).
jake
Ellenőrizve
7 perc 33 másodperc ago
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.
Feliratkozás a következőre: Linux Weekly News hírcsatorna