Hírolvasó

Parrot 6.4 released

11 óra 34 perc óta
Parrot is a Debian-based distribution with an emphasis on security improvement and tools; the 6.4 release is now available. "Many tools, like Metasploit, Sliver, Caido and Empire received important updates, the Linux kernel was updated to a more recent version, and the latest LTS version of Firefox was provided with all our privacy oriented patches.".
corbet

[$] Following up on the Python JIT

23 óra 14 perc óta
Performance of Python programs has been a major focus of development for the language over the last five years or so; the Faster CPython project has been a big part of that effort. One of its subprojects is to add an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler to the language; at last year's PyCon US, project member Brandt Bucher gave an introduction to the copy-and-patch JIT compiler. At PyCon US 2025, he followed that up with a talk on "What they don't tell you about building a JIT compiler for CPython" to describe some of the things he wishes he had known when he set out to work on that project. There was something of an elephant in the room, however, in that Microsoft dropped support for the project and laid off most of its Faster CPython team a few days before the talk.
jake

Security updates for Monday

23 óra 29 perc óta
Security updates have been issued by Debian (redis and thunderbird), Fedora (cef, git, gnutls, httpd, linux-firmware, luajit, mingw-djvulibre, mingw-python-requests, perl, php, python-requests, python3.6, salt, and selenium-manager), Mageia (dpkg, firefox, gnupg2, and golang), Slackware (httpd and kernel), SUSE (afterburn, cmctl, git, go1.23, go1.24, k9s, liboqs-devel, libxml2, php8, python36, trivy, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-xilinx-zynqmp and nix).
jake

Kernel prepatch 6.16-rc6

1 nap 7 óra óta
Linus has released 6.16-rc6 for testing; it includes a fix for a somewhat scary regression that came up over the week.

So I was flailing around blaming everybody and their pet hamster, because for a while it looked like a drm issue and then a netlink problem (it superficially coincided with separate issues with both of those subsystems).

But I did eventually figure out how to trigger it reliably and then it bisected nicely, and a couple of days have passed, and I'm feeling much better about the release again. We're back on track, and despite that little scare, I think we're in good shape.

corbet

Pete Zaitcev: AI writing

3 nap 4 óra óta
On the topic of AI writing code, I've read a Sci-Fi story some 30 years ago, probably from the 1950s or 1960s.

At the future Earth, fiction writers write using machines. The quality of writing is associated with the sophistication of writer's machine. Publishers reject stories written on a lower end machine. The hero of the story is a struggling writer, who has to make do with a cheap unit. As his machine writes poorly, he's paid little, so he cannot save up for an upgrade. He hatches a plan to sneak into the house of a successful writer, and use the better machine to write a break-out story. The oddly prescient punch-line is, he discovers that the successful writer's machine was non-functional. His better wrote his stories manually in secret.

I wonder if such scenario may even be possible, programming-wise, if you work in a company that does not micro-manage velocity, or work as a consultant, so that your sausage factory remains behind a curtain.

[$] SFrame-based stack unwinding for the kernel

3 nap 18 óra óta
The kernel's perf events subsystem can produce high-quality profiles, with full function-call chains, of resource usage within the kernel itself. Developers, however, often would like to see profiles of the whole system in one integrated report with, for example, call-stack information that crosses the boundary between the kernel and user space. Support for unwinding user-space call stacks in the perf events subsystem is currently inefficient at best. A long-running effort to provide reliable, user-space call-stack unwinding within the kernel, which will improve that situation considerably, appears to be reaching fruition.
corbet

Security updates for Friday

3 nap 18 óra óta
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gnome-remote-desktop, go-toolset:rhel8, golang, jq, kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, and podman), Fedora (chromium, git, helix, pam, rust-blazesym-c, rust-clearscreen, rust-gitui, rust-nu-cli, rust-nu-command, rust-nu-test-support, rust-procs, rust-which, selenium-manager, sudo, thunderbird, and uv), SUSE (audiofile, chmlib-devel, docker, firefox, go1, libsoup, libsoup2, libssh, libxml2, tomcat, umoci, and xen), and Ubuntu (git and resteasy, resteasy3.0).
jzb