Linux Weekly News

The pytest-mh project is a plugin that provides a multi-host test framework for the popular pytest unit-testing framework and test runner. Work on pytest-mh started in 2023 to solve a multitude of issues that cropped up for developers and testers when testing the SSSD project, which is a client for enterprise identity management. I was not happy with the state of testing of the SSSD project and wanted to create something that would increase test readability, remove duplication, eliminate errors, and provide multi-host testing capabilities, while having the flexibility to build a new API around it. Finally, I also wanted something that can be used by anyone to test their projects as well.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released another four stable kernels: 6.13.4, 6.12.16, 6.6.79, and 6.1.129. As usual, all users are advised to upgrade.

You are not forced to take any Rust code, or care about any Rust code in the DMA code. You can ignore it.

But "ignore the Rust side" automatically also means that you don't have any *say* on the Rust side.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I want to have nothing to do with Rust", and then in the very next sentence say "And that means that the Rust code that I will ignore cannot use the C interfaces I maintain".

The code in question seems highly likely to be merged for the 6.15 release.

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• Briefs: Asahi leadership; Debian images; RISC-V Fedora; OpenSUSE; Mesa 25.0.0; Pi-hole v6; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Corporation, has announced leadership updates for Mozilla. This includes a Mozilla Leadership Council made up of executives from each Mozilla organization, and new board chairs for the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, the Mozilla Corporation, and Mozilla.ai. The announcement also indicates a desire to further "diversify" Mozilla's focus:

Steven Rostedt recently posted a patch set that could help improve the performance of certain user-space applications by giving the scheduler more context about when they are safe to interrupt. The patch set lets programs request a small grace window before they can be interrupted so that they can relinquish any locks, decreasing the amount of time that other threads have to spend waiting. Rostedt shared performance numbers suggesting that the patch might cut the amount of time spent acquiring locks in half for some programs — although, since his test was specifically tuned for this case, real-world projects should expect a somewhat less dramatic improvement. The change received some pushback from scheduler maintainer Peter Zijlstra, who objected to the patch set's approach.

The Fedora Project has announced two milestones in its journey to supporting the RISC-V architecture: a dedicated RISC-V Koji build system instance is live in the Fedora data center, and Fedora 41-based images are now available for RISC-V. It is also possible to run Fedora RISC-V images using QEMU for those without supported hardware.

Debian Developer Thomas Lange has written a blog post in the attempt to help users find the right Debian image for their systems.

Pi-hole v6 has been released. The latest version of the popular ad-blocking software sports a redesigned user interface, has support for subscribing to allowlists, and brings a new REST API and embedded web server. Its Docker/OCI image is now based on Alpine Linux rather than Debian to reduce image size. See the announcement for guidance on upgrading existing Pi-hole installations.

[Bernhard] Wiedemann took on this 4-month-long project to create a fork of openSUSE that has 100% bit-reproducible packages. So far ring0 (aka bootstrap) and ring1 with 3,300 software packages have all successfully been patched and tested.

This build is not yet recommended for production use, though.

Kernel developers have been working to convert various internal interfaces to use folios; while this process has been progressing, there is still the occasional regression introduced by the change. In December 2024, it was discovered that installing a Flatpak application could trigger a filesystem bug in the kernel that would cause the software to read incorrect data from the disk. The problem was quickly fixed — only for an another problem caused by the folio rewrite to pop up in the same kernel subsystem. This was discovered by an Arch Linux user, who noticed that selecting files in a Flatpak application was causing kernel crashes. Now both bugs are fixed, but there may be more bugs to find.