Linux Weekly News

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) R14.0.8 release is out. Trinity started out as a fork of KDE 3. "Ten years ago today, the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) saw the release of its first version (3.5.11). Lot of things have happened since that day but TDE has continued to grow and flourish throughout the years. Today the project is healthier than ever, with dedicated self-hosted servers, regular releases, modern collaboration tools and a vibrant community of users and enthusiasts."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, openjdk-7, openjdk-8, and openldap), Fedora (openvpn), openSUSE (teeworlds and vlc), Red Hat (bind, binutils, bluez, container-tools:1.0, container-tools:2.0, container-tools:rhel8, cups, curl, dnsmasq, dpdk, e2fsprogs, edk2, evolution, exiv2, fontforge, freeradius:3.0, gcc, gdb, glibc, GNOME, grafana, GStreamer, libmad, and SDL, haproxy, ibus and glib2, irssi, kernel, kernel-rt, liblouis, libmspack, libreoffice, libsndfile, libtiff, libxml2, memcached, mod_auth_mellon, openssl, patch, php:7.2, pki-core:10.6 and pki-deps:10.6, python-pip, python-twisted-web, python27:2.7, python3, qt5, rsyslog, ruby, samba, sqlite, sudo, systemd, targetcli, tcpdump, unbound, unzip, wavpack, and zziplib), SUSE (samba, squid, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oem, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-gke-5.3, linux-hwe,linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-raspi2-5.3, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-raspi2,linux-snapdragon, linux-gke-5.0, linux-oem-osp11, and samba).

Christian Schaller writes about the desktop improvements found in Fedora 32 — and beyond. "We spent a lot of time and energy over the last 6 years to get to where we are now, putting in place a lot of the basic building blocks needed to make Linux a great desktop operating system. And it feels great that just as we kick of the new line of Lenovo laptops running Fedora we are also entering a new phase of development where we can move beyond getting our basic infrastructure in place, but we can really start taking advantage of it to rapidly improve the experience we are providing even more. A good example is the Firefox work mentioned above, where we finally could move on from ‘make it work with Wayland and PipeWire, to ‘lets take advantage of these new pieces to make Firefox on Linux better’."

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, java-1.7.0-openjdk, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, qemu-kvm, and thunderbird), Debian (qemu and ruby-json), Fedora (chromium, haproxy, and libssh), openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine and teeworlds), Oracle (kernel), SUSE (apache2, git, kernel, ovmf, and xen), and Ubuntu (cups, file-roller, and re2c).

The Fedora 32 distribution release is out, in workstation, server, and CoreOS variants. "Following our 'First' foundation, we’ve updated key programming language and system library packages, including GCC 10, Ruby 2.7, and Python 3.8. Of course, with Python 2 past end-of-life, we’ve removed most Python 2 packages from Fedora. A legacy python27 package is provided for developers and users who still need it. In Fedora Workstation, we’ve enabled the EarlyOOM service by default to improve the user experience in low-memory situations."

For as long as operating systems have had kernels, there has been a need to extract information from data structures stored within those kernels. Over the years, a wide range of approaches have been taken to make that information available. In current times, it has become natural to reach for BPF as the tool of choice for a variety of problems, and getting information from kernel data structures is no exception. There are two patches in circulation that take rather different approaches to using BPF to dump information from kernel data structures to user space.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium), Debian (eog, jsch, libgsf, mailman, ncmpc, openjdk-11, php5, python-reportlab, radicale, and rzip), Fedora (ansible, dolphin-emu, git, gnuchess, liblas, openvpn, php, qt5-qtbase, rubygem-rake, snakeyaml, webkit2gtk3, and wireshark), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, git, java-1.8.0-openjdk, kernel, kernel-linus, mp3gain, and virtualbox), openSUSE (crawl, cups, freeradius-server, kubernetes, and otrs), SUSE (apache2, kernel, pam_radius, resource-agents, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (openexr).

The 5.7-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Again, that all looks very normal and very much 'nothing really odd stands out'. In a world gone mad, the kernel looks almost boringly regular. Which is just how I like it."

Version 20.04 of the Kdenlive libre video editor has been released. "The highlights include major speed improvements due to the Preview Scaling feature, New rating, tagging sorting and filtering of clips in the Project Bin for a great logging experience, Pitch shifting is now possible when using the speed effect, Multicam editing improvements and OpenTimelineIO support. Besides all the shiny new features, this version comes with fixes for 40 critical stability issues as well as a major revamp of the user experience. Kdenlive is now more reliable than ever before."

Keeping LWN going is a full-time job — indeed, it is multiple full-time jobs. We are currently hiring another writer to help us get this work done and to help expand our content range. If you have a deep understanding of the Linux and free-software communities and can write high-quality English, this is your chance to write for one of the most engaged and challenging reader communities around; we would like to hear from you.

OpenSUSE Leap is a community distribution built on top of source packages from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). Recently, Gerald Pfeifer, chair of the openSUSE board, posted an announcement describing a proposal from SUSE to unify some packages between SLE and openSUSE Leap. Here we analyze the proposal and the community's reaction to it.

Fedora Magazine announces that Lenovo will start offering three laptop models with Fedora Workstation preinstalled. "The Lenovo team has been working with folks at Red Hat who work on Fedora desktop technologies to make sure that the upcoming Fedora 32 Workstation is ready to go on their laptops. The best part about this is that we’re not bending our rules for them. Lenovo is following our existing trademark guidelines and respects our open source principles. That’s right—these laptops ship with software exclusively from the official Fedora repos! When they ship, you’ll see Fedora 32 Workstation. (Models which can benefit from the NVIDIA binary driver can install it in the normal way after the fact, by opting in to proprietary software sources.)"

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released six new stable kernels: 5.6.7, 5.4.35, 4.19.118, 4.14.177, 4.9.220, and 4.4.220. They all contain a rather large set of fixes throughout the tree; users of those series should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (lib32-openssl), Debian (git), Gentoo (chromium, firefox, git, and openssl), Oracle (kernel and python-twisted-web), Red Hat (python-twisted-web), Scientific Linux (python-twisted-web), and SUSE (file-roller, kernel, and resource-agents).

The 20.04 long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu, code named "Focal Fossa", is out. There are desktop and server editions, as well as all of the different Ubuntu flavors: Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu. "The Ubuntu kernel has been updated to the 5.4 based Linux kernel, with additional support for Wireguard VPN, AUFS5, and improved support for IBM, Intel, Raspberry Pi and AMD hardware. [...] 20.04 LTS also brings support for installing an Ubuntu desktop system on top of ZFS. The latest version brings performance enhancements and optional encryption support. Zsys, Ubuntu’s ZFS system tool, provides automated system and user state saving. Tight integration with GRUB allows a user to revert to any system state on boot and go back in time to pave the way to a bulletproof Ubuntu Desktop." More information can be found in the release notes.

The realtime scheduler classes are intended to allow a developer to state which tasks have the highest priorities with the assurance that, at any given time, the highest-priority task will have unimpeded access to the CPU. The kernel itself carries out a number of tasks that have tight time constraints, so it is natural to want to assign realtime priorities to kernel threads carrying out those tasks. But, as Peter Zijlstra argues in a new patch set, it makes little sense for the kernel to be assigning such priorities; to put an end to that practice, he is proposing to take away most of the kernel's ability to prioritize its own threads.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (openssl), openSUSE (freeradius-server, kernel, thunderbird, and vlc), Oracle (git, java-1.7.0-openjdk, java-1.8.0-openjdk, and java-11-openjdk), SUSE (ardana-ansible, ardana-barbican, ardana-db, ardana-monasca, ardana-mq, ardana-neutron, ardana-octavia, ardana-tempest, crowbar-core, crowbar-ha, crowbar-openstack, documentation-suse-openstack-cloud, memcached, openstack-manila, openstack-neutron, openstack-nova, pdns, python-amqp, rubygem-puma, zookeeper, cups, kernel, ovmf, and pacemaker), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8, openjdk-lts and re2c).

Alyssa Rosenzweig has posted a detailed look at progress on the Panfrost driver (a reverse-engineered driver for Arm Mali GPUs) on the Collabora blog. "Putting it all together, we have the beginnings of a Bifrost compiler, sufficient for the screenshots above. Next will be adding support for more complex instructions and scheduling to support more complex shaders."

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 23, 2020 is available.

A recent thread on the python-ideas mailing list explores adding a feature to Python, which is the normal fare for that forum. The problem being addressed is real, but may not be the highest-priority problem for the language on many people's lists. Function calls that have multiple keyword arguments passed from a variable of the same name (e.g. keyword=keyword) require developers to repeat themselves and can be somewhat confusing, especially to newcomers. The discussion of ways to fix it highlighted some lesser-known corners of the language, however, regardless of whether the idea will actually result in a change to Python.