Linux Weekly News

Davidlohr Bueso has posted a summary of the CXL microconference at the recently concluded Linux Plumbers Conference. "The goals for the track were to openly discuss current on-going development efforts around the core driver, as well as experimental memory management topics which lead to accommodating kernel infrastructure for new technology and use cases."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (amanda, ncurses, nghttp2, opendkim, rabbitmq-server, and roundcube), Fedora (golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, and samba), Mageia (audiofile, galera, libvpx, and virtualbox), Oracle (kernel and postgresql:13), SUSE (openssl-3, optipng, and python-Pillow), and Ubuntu (firefox).

Linus has released 6.7-rc4 for testing. "And things look fine for now, with a fairly small rc4".

Meanwhile, the 6.6.4, 6.1.65, and 5.15.141 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Support for NVIDIA graphics processors has traditionally been a sore point for Linux users; NVIDIA has not felt the need to cooperate with the kernel community or make free drivers available, and the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver has often struggled to keep up with product releases. There have, however, been signs of improvement in recent years. At the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference, graphics subsystem maintainer Dave Airlie provided an update on the state of support for NVIDIA GPUs and what remains to be done.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, gimp-dds, horizon, libde265, thunderbird, vlc, and zbar), Fedora (java-17-openjdk and xen), Mageia (optipng, roundcubemail, and xrdp), Red Hat (postgresql), Slackware (samba), SUSE (chromium, containerd, docker, runc, libqt4, opera, python-django-grappelli, sqlite3, and traceroute), and Ubuntu (linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-azure-fde, linux-azure-fde-5.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.15, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gkeop, and linux-azure, linux-azure-6.2, linux-azure-fde-6.2, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-6.2).

The Android system was once famous for extensive, out-of-tree kernel enhancements. Many of those have been eliminated or upstreamed over the years, bringing Android much closer to the mainline kernel. One significant component in the "upstreamed" category is Binder, an interprocess communication mechanism that is used only by Android. There are a number of factors that make Binder a good candidate for rewriting in the Rust language; at the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference, Carlos Llamas and Alice Ryhl described the motivation behind and implementation of a rewrite of Binder in Rust.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium, gnutls, gst-devtools, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-doc, libcap, mingw-poppler, python-gstreamer1, qbittorrent, webkitgtk, and xen), Mageia (docker, kernel-linus, and python-django), Oracle (dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, dotnet8.0, firefox, samba, squid, and thunderbird), Red Hat (firefox, postgresql:13, squid, and thunderbird), SUSE (cilium, freerdp, java-1_8_0-ibm, and java-1_8_0-openj9), and Ubuntu (ec2-hibinit-agent, freerdp2, gimp, gst-plugins-bad1.0, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, openjdk-lts, openjdk-8, pypy3, pysha3, and u-boot-nezha).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 30, 2023 is available.

The LibreQoS project describes itself as:

LibreQoS is a Quality of Experience (QoE) Smart Queue Management (SQM) system designed for Internet Service Providers to optimize the flow of their network traffic and thus reduce bufferbloat, keep the network responsive, and improve the end-user experience.

Version 1.4 of LibreQoS was released on November 17. "Version 1.4 is a huge milestone. A whole new back-end, new GUI, 30%+ performance improvements, support for single-interface mode."

In the Kernel Summit track at the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Stefan Roesch led a session on kernel samepage merging (KSM). He gave an overview of the feature and described some recent changes to KSM. He showed how an application can enable KSM to deduplicate its memory and how the feature can be evaluated to determine whether it is a good fit for new workloads. In addition, he provided some real-world data of the benefits from his workplace at Meta.

Nextcloud has announced the "acquisition" of the Roundcube webmail system.

As a product, Roundcube has an established path to success on its own. With opportunities remaining to be explored, a direct merger between Roundcube and Nextcloud is not planned. Neither will Roundcube replace Nextcloud Mail or the other way around. The products both have strengths and weaknesses and as open source products they already do share some underlying libraries and tools, but remain independent offerings for overlapping but different use scenarios. Nextcloud Mail will evolve as it is, focused on being used naturally within Nextcloud. Roundcube will continue to serve its active and new users as a stand-alone secure mail client.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gst-plugins-bad1.0 and postgresql-multicorn), Fedora (golang-github-nats-io, golang-github-nats-io-jwt-2, golang-github-nats-io-nkeys, golang-github-nats-io-streaming-server, libcap, nats-server, openvpn, and python-geopandas), Mageia (kernel), Red Hat (c-ares, curl, fence-agents, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libxml2, pixman, postgresql, and tigervnc), SUSE (python-azure-storage-queue, python-Twisted, and python3-Twisted), and Ubuntu (afflib, ec2-hibinit-agent, linux-nvidia-6.2, linux-starfive-6.2, and poppler).

The drgn Python-based kernel debugger was developed by Omar Sandoval for use in his job on the kernel team at Meta. He now spends most of his time working on drgn, both in developing new features for the tool and in using it to debug production problems at Meta, which gives him a view of both ends of that feedback loop. At the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), he led a session on drgn in the kernel debugging microconference, where he wanted to brainstorm on how to add some new features to the debugger and, in particular, how to allow them to work on production kernels.

The large 6.6.3, 6.5.13, 6.1.64, 5.15.140, 5.10.202, 5.4.262, 4.19.300, 4.14.331 stable kernel updates have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes. Note that 6.5.13 is the final update for 6.5.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cryptojs, fastdds, mediawiki, and minizip), Fedora (chromium, kubernetes, and thunderbird), Mageia (lilypond, mariadb, and packages), Red Hat (firefox, linux-firmware, and thunderbird), SUSE (compat-openssl098, gstreamer-plugins-bad, squashfs, squid, thunderbird, vim, and xerces-c), and Ubuntu (libtommath, linux-intel-iotg, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-oracle, perl, and python3.8, python3.10, python3.11).

A regular feature of the Kernel Maintainers Summit is a session where Linus Torvalds discusses the problems that he has been encountering. In recent years, though, there have been relatively few of those problems, so this year he turned things around a bit by asking the community what problems it was seeing instead. He then addressed them at the Summit in a session covering aspects of the development community, including feedback to maintainers, diversity (or the lack thereof), and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (freeimage, gimp, gst-plugins-bad1.0, node-json5, opensc, python-requestbuilder, reportbug, strongswan, symfony, thunderbird, and tiff), Fedora (chromium, galera, golang, kubernetes, mariadb, python-asyncssh, thunderbird, vim, and webkitgtk), Gentoo (AIDE, Apptainer, GLib, GNU Libmicrohttpd, Go, GRUB, LibreOffice, MiniDLNA, multipath-tools, Open vSwitch, phpMyAdmin, QtWebEngine, and RenderDoc), Slackware (vim), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-bad, java-1_8_0-ibm, openvswitch, poppler, slurm, slurm_22_05, slurm_23_02, sqlite3, vim, webkit2gtk3, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (openvswitch and thunderbird).

PipeWire, the audio/video bus meant to replace PulseAudio, JACK, and other systems, has reached 1.0. In celebration, Fedora Magazine is running an interview with PipeWire creator Wim Taymans.

PipeWire is an IPC mechanism for multimedia. The most interesting stuff will happen in the session manager, the modules, the applications and the tools around all this. I hope to see more cool tools to route video and set up video filters etc.

Linus has released 6.7-rc3 for testing. "The diffstat here is dominated by a couple of reverts of some Realtek phy code (accounting for almost a third of the diff). But ignoring that, it's mostly fairly small, and all over the place."

OpenSSL 3.2.0 has been released. New features include client-side QUIC support, a number of new cryptographic algorithms, support for TCP fast open, TLS certificate compression, and more.