Linux Weekly News

Overstressed maintainers are a constant topic of conversation throughout the open-source community. Kernel maintainers have been complaining more loudly than usual recently about overwork and stress. The problems that maintainers are facing are clear; what to do about them is rather less so. A session at the 2023 Maintainers Summit took up the topic yet again with the hope of finding some solutions; there may be answers, perhaps even within the kernel community, but a general solution still seems distant.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, gnutls28, intel-microcode, and tor), Fedora (chromium, microcode_ctl, openvpn, and vim), Gentoo (LinuxCIFS utils, SQLite, and Zeppelin), Oracle (c-ares, container-tools:4.0, dotnet7.0, kernel, kernel-container, nodejs:20, open-vm-tools, squid:4, and tigervnc), Red Hat (samba and squid), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (fdo-client, firefox, libxml2, maven, maven-resolver, sbt, xmvn, poppler, python-Pillow, squid, strongswan, and xerces-c), and Ubuntu (apache2, firefox, glusterfs, nghttp2, poppler, python2.7, python3.5, python3.6, tiff, and zfs-linux).

November 23 is the US Thanksgiving holiday; as is our tradition, we will not be publishing an LWN Weekly Edition this week as we will be far too busy eating. We wish a good holiday to all of our readers (whether they celebrate it or not); the weekly edition will return on November 30.

Rust has been a prominent topic at the Kernel Maintainers Summit for the last couple of years, and the 2023 meeting continued that tradition. As Rust-for-Linux developer Miguel Ojeda noted at the beginning of the session dedicated to the topic, the level of interest in using Rust for kernel development has increased significantly over the last year. But Rust was explicitly added to Linux as an experiment; is the kernel community now ready to say that the experiment has succeeded?

Security updates have been issued by Debian (gimp), Fedora (audiofile and firefox), Mageia (postgresql), Red Hat (binutils, c-ares, fence-agents, glibc, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libcap, libqb, linux-firmware, ncurses, pixman, python-setuptools, samba, and tigervnc), Slackware (kernel and mozilla), SUSE (apache2-mod_jk, avahi, container-suseconnect, java-1_8_0-openjdk, libxml2, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openvswitch, python3-setuptools, strongswan, ucode-intel, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (frr, gnutls28, hibagent, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.15, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-bluefield, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.4, linux-iot, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-6.2, linux-hwe-6.2, linux-kvm, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.2, linux-raspi, linux-starfive, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-laptop, linux-lowlatency, linux-oem-6.5, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-starfive, linux-oem-6.1, mosquitto, rabbitmq-server, squid, and tracker-miners).

The GNU Name System has now been formalized as RFC 9498.

GNS addresses long-standing security and privacy issues in the ubiquitous Domain Name System (DNS). Previous attempts to secure DNS (DNSSEC) fail to address critical security issues such as end-to-end security, query privacy, censorship, and centralization of root zone governance. After 40 years of patching, it is time for a new beginning.

Version 2.43.0 of the Git source-code management system has been release. It includes a long list of improvements and minor new features.

The Linux kernel supports a wide variety of filesystems, many of which are no longer in heavy use — or, perhaps, any use at all. The kernel code implementing the less-popular filesystems tends to be relatively unpopular as well, receiving little in the way of maintenance. Keeping old filesystems alive does place a burden on kernel developers, though, so it is not surprising that there is pressure to remove the least popular ones. At the 2023 Kernel Maintainers Summit, the developers talked about these filesystems and what can be done about them.

Version 120.0 of the Firefox browser is out. Changes include a new "copy link without site tracking" option, the ability to enable the Global Privacy Control feature, and some additional privacy features seemingly restricted to users in Germany. The browser will now also import TLS root certificates from the operating system by default on Windows, macOS, and Android.

Faith Ekstrand has announced that the NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA "Turing" GPUs has been certified as being fully compliant with the Vulkan 1.0 API.

Practically, it means that we can pass the entire Vulkan conformance test suite. From the Khronos perspective, it means that NVK now meets the bar required to claim to support the Vulkan API officially. (There are some legal implications to this which matter to the Mesa project, but most users don't care about them.) From the perspective of users, it means the driver should pretty much work on Turing and later GPUs.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (activemq, strongswan, and wordpress), Mageia (u-boot), SUSE (avahi, frr, libreoffice, nghttp2, openssl, openssl1, postgresql, postgresql15, postgresql16, python-Twisted, ucode-intel, and xen), and Ubuntu (avahi, hibagent, nodejs, strongswan, tang, and webkit2gtk).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.6.2, 6.5.12, 6.1.63, 5.15.139, 5.10.201, 5.4.261, 4.19.299, and 4.14.330 stable kernels. They contain a rather large number of important fixes throughout the kernel tree.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (freerdp2, lwip, netty, and wireshark), Fedora (dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, golang, gst-devtools, gstreamer1, gstreamer1-doc, gstreamer1-plugin-libav, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-base, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, gstreamer1-rtsp-server, gstreamer1-vaapi, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-gstreamer1, syncthing, and tigervnc), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, haproxy, and tigervnc), Oracle (curl, ghostscript, microcode_ctl, nghttp2, open-vm-tools, samba, and squid), SUSE (gcc13, postgresql14, and yt-dlp), and Ubuntu (iniparser).

The second 6.7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "The most noticeable thing is probably the turbostat tool update, which actually came in during the merge window, but was delayed by just waiting for getting the pull request properly signed."

One of the core constraints when programming in the kernel is the need to avoid sleeping when running in atomic context. For the most part, the responsibility for adherence to this rule is placed on the developer's shoulders; Rust developers, though, want the compiler to ensure that code is safe whenever possible. At the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference, Gary Guo presented (via a remote link) the klint tool, which can find and flag many atomic-context violations before they turn into user-affecting bugs.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (microcode_ctl, pack, and tigervnc), Slackware (gimp), SUSE (frr, gcc13, go1.20, go1.20-openssl, go1.21, go1.21-openssl, libnbd, libxml2, python-Pillow, python-urllib3, and xen), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode and openvpn).

Version 1.74.0 of the Rust language has been released. New features include better configuration for linters, authenticated cargo repositories, and support for projections in opaque return types.

The addition of realtime support to Linux is a long story; it first shows up in LWN in 2004. For much of that time, it has seemed like only a little more work was needed to get across the finish line; thus we ran headlines like the realtime preemption endgame — in 2009. At the 2023 Linux Plumbers Conference, Thomas Gleixner informed the group that, now, the end truly is near. There is really only one big problem left to be solved before all of that work can land in the mainline.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium and openvpn), Oracle (kernel, microcode_ctl, plexus-archiver, and python), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, dotnet8.0, kernel, linux-firmware, and open-vm-tools), SUSE (apache2, chromium, jhead, postgresql12, postgresql13, and qemu), and Ubuntu (dotnet6, dotnet7, dotnet8, frr, python-pip, quagga, and tidy-html5).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for November 16, 2023 is available.