Linux Weekly News

In the end, Linus decided to hold the 5.12 release for one more week and put out 5.12-rc8 instead. "Ok, so it's been _fairly_ calm this past week, but it hasn't been the kind of dead calm I would have taken to mean 'no rc8 necessary'. So here we are, with an extra rc to make sure things are all settled down."

Version 12.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. This appears to be a release with a lot of incremental improvements rather than large headline features; see the various sets of release notes in the announcement for details.

The Debian project has voted strongly to retain Jonathan Carter as the project leader. On that other little nagging issue, the project has voted not to issue a statement regarding Richard Stallman's return to the Free Software Foundation board of directors. This, too, was a relatively strong result over the other options. Details can be found on the specific pages for the project leader and general resolution ballots.

Today's crop of stable kernels includes the following: 4.4.267, 4.9.267, 4.14.231, 4.19.188, 5.4.113, 5.10.31, and 5.11.15. As usual. they contain important fixes throughout the tree; users of those series should upgrade.

One of the key resources that defines a process is its address space — the set of mappings that determines what any specific memory address means within that process. An address space is normally private to the process it belongs to, but there are situations where one process needs to make changes to another process's memory; an interactive debugger would be one case in point. The ptrace() system call makes such changes possible, but it is slow and not always easy to use, so there has been a longstanding quest for better alternatives. One possibility, process_vm_exec() from Andrei Vagin, was recently posted for review.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (smarty3), Fedora (libpano13, python3.8, and seamonkey), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, gstreamer1.0, thunderbird, and x11-server), Oracle (libldb and thunderbird), SUSE (grafana and system-user-grafana, kernel, and openldap2), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-5.3, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-kvm, linux-oem-5.10, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-raspi2-5.3, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, and linux-oem-5.6).

A new organization for maintainers and contributors to GNU tools, the GNU Assembly, has announced its existence. "We’re excited to kick off the GNU Assembly and its web site! This place intends to be a collaboration platform for the developers of GNU packages who are all 'hacking for user freedom' and who share a vision for the umbrella project." It is an outgrowth of discussions on changes to GNU governance from a few years back, but its origins are even older than that. The organization is working on its governance model and invites those interested to its Assembly mailing list.

The Fedora project may have managed to shake off its reputation for delayed releases in recent years, but that hasn't stopped the release date for Fedora 34 from slipping one week to April 27. Modulo a handful of bugs, though, this release is in its final form, so a look at what is coming is warranted. Distribution releases, especially those for fast-moving community distributions, are a good point at which to catch up with the state of many free-software projects and where Linux is headed in general. Fedora 34 includes a lot of changes, including the GNOME 40 release but, for the most part, it looks like an exercise in continuity.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (xorg-server), Fedora (kernel), openSUSE (clamav, fluidsynth, python-bleach, spamassassin, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (gnutls and nettle, libldb, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (clamav, util-linux, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (network-manager and underscore).

The Google security blog has a detailed article on what a device driver written in Rust looks like. "That is, we use Rust's ownership discipline when interacting with C code by handing the C portion ownership of a Rust object, allowing it to call functions implemented in Rust, then eventually giving ownership back. So as long as the C code is correct, the lifetime of Rust file objects work seamlessly as well, with the compiler enforcing correct lifetime management on the Rust side, for example: open cannot return stack-allocated pointers or heap-allocated objects containing pointers to the stack, ioctl/read/write cannot free (or modify without synchronization) the contents of the object stored in filp->private_data, etc."

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 15, 2021 is available.

In early April, Fedora program manager Ben Cotton posted a proposal to use the distribution's debuginfod servers by default in Fedora 35. This feature would help developers who are trying to debug or trace their programs using various tools, but who are lacking the source code and debugging symbols needed. The servers can provide that data directly to the tools as needed, but there are some security and privacy concerns to work through before turning the feature on by default.

The OpenStack cloud-infrastructure project has made its 23rd release, Wallaby. "The Wallaby release strengthens open infrastructure for cloud native applications with enhanced security and integration with other open source technologies. More than 17,000 code changes authored by over 800 contributors from 140 different organizations and 45 countries were merged into the release. In addition to delivering a wide range of improvements to the stable and reliable OpenStack core and its highly flexible project integration capabilities, Wallaby delivers security enhancements including fallback permissions and RBAC improvements in Ironic [bare-metal provisioning service], Glance [image service] and Manila [shared filesystems], and the community focused this cycle on migrating the RBAC policy format from JSON to YAML. Additionally, the Ironic project has extended functionality for UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), including secure erase for NVME."

Stable kernels 5.11.14, 5.10.30, 5.4.112, and 4.19.187 have been released with important fixes throughout the tree. Users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (screen), Debian (clamav, courier-authlib, and tomcat9), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (clamav, glibc, kernel, open-iscsi, opensc, spamassassin, thunderbird, wpa_supplicant, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-oem-5.10, linux-oem-5.6, nettle, and xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-16.04, xorg-server-hwe-18.04).

The FreeBSD 13 release is out. It includes a lot of updated software, the removal of a number of GNU tools (including the toolchain), and more, but not WireGuard. See the release notes for the details.

There are times when developers and system administrators need to diagnose problems in running code. The program to be examined can be a user-space process, the kernel, or both. Two of the major tools available on Linux to perform this sort of analysis are SystemTap and bpftrace. SystemTap has been available since 2005, while bpftrace is a more recent contender that, to some, may appear to have made SystemTap obsolete. However, SystemTap is still the preferred tool for some real-world use cases.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libpano13), Fedora (mosquitto and perl-Net-CIDR-Lite), Mageia (curl, mongodb, pdfbox, python-jinja2, rygel, spamassassin, tor, velocity, webkit2, and wireshark), openSUSE (umoci), Oracle (389-ds:1.4, kernel, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (kernel and kpatch-patch), Slackware (dnsmasq and irssi), and SUSE (cifs-utils, rubygem-actionpack-4_2, and spamassassin).

While some parts of the core kernel reached a relatively stable "done" state years ago, others never really seem to be finished. One of the latter variety is undoubtedly the kernel's implementation of spinlocks, which arbitrate access to data at the lowest levels of the kernel. Lock performance can have a significant effect on the performance of the system as a whole, so optimization work can pay back big dividends. Lest one think that this work is finally done, the NUMA-aware qspinlock patch set shows how some more performance can be squeezed out of the kernel's spinlock implementation.

The Free Software Foundation has finally issued a statement on why the decision to return Richard Stallman to the organization's board of directors was taken. We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocate of freedom in computing.

RMS acknowledges that he has made mistakes. He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF. While his personal style remains troubling for some, a majority of the board feel his behavior has moderated and believe that his thinking strengthens the work of the FSF in pursuit of its mission.

There is also a separate statement from Stallman.