Linux Weekly News

One of the features of the Clang/LLVM compiler that has been rather lacking for GCC may finally be getting filled in. In a mid-November post to the gcc-patches mailing list, David Malcolm described a new static-analysis framework for GCC that he wrote. It could be the starting point for a whole range of code analysis for the compiler.

Making a comparison between Linux and Kubernetes is often one of apples to oranges. There are, however, some similarities and there is an effort within the Kubernetes community to make Kubernetes more like a Linux distribution. The idea was outlined in a session about Kubernetes release engineering at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019. "You might have heard that Kubernetes is the Linux of the cloud and that's like super easy to say, but what does it mean? Cloud is pretty fuzzy on its own," Tim Pepper, the Kubernetes release special interest group (SIG Release) co-chair said. He proceeded to provide some clarity on how the two projects are similar.

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (389-ds-base, ghostscript, kernel, and tcpdump), Debian (libonig), Fedora (clamav, firefox, and oniguruma), openSUSE (calamares, cloud-init, haproxy, libarchive, libidn2, libxml2, and ucode-intel), Scientific Linux (SDL and tcpdump), Slackware (mozilla), and Ubuntu (haproxy, intel-microcode, and postgresql-common).

ZDNet reports that two more malicious modules have been removed from the Python Package Index. "The two libraries were created by the same developer and mimicked other more popular libraries -- using a technique called typosquatting to register similarly-looking names. The first is 'python3-dateutil,' which imitated the popular 'dateutil' library. The second is 'jeIlyfish' (the first L is an I), which mimicked the 'jellyfish' library." The latter of the two had been in PyPI for nearly a year.

Firefox 71 is available. New features include improvements to the Lockwise integrated password manager and native MP3 decoding. The release notes have more details.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (intel-ucode and libtiff), Debian (exiv2), Oracle (SDL), Red Hat (kernel, patch, and python-jinja2), and Ubuntu (graphicsmagick, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.0, linux-gcp, linux-gke-5.0, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oem-osp1, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.0, linux-raspi2, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-gcp, linux-gke-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oem, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.3, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, and sqlite3).

Mark Wielaard has posted a summary of the discussion thus far on the governance of the GNU project. "The mentoring and apprenticeship discussion focused on the GNU maintainers as being the core of the GNU project. But as was pointed out there are also webmasters, translators, infrastructure maintainers (partially paid FSF staff and volunteers), education and conference organizers, etc. All these people are GNU stakeholders. And how we organize governance of the GNU project should also involve them."

The 5.5 merge window got underway immediately after the release of the 5.4 kernel on November 24. The first week has been quite busy despite the US Thanksgiving holiday landing in the middle of it. Read on for a summary of what the first 6,300 changesets brought for the next major kernel release.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (389-ds-base, asterisk, file, nss, proftpd-dfsg, ssvnc, and tnef), Fedora (chromium, djvulibre, freeradius, ImageMagick, jhead, kernel, phpMyAdmin, python-pillow, and rubygem-rmagick), Mageia (bzip2, chromium-browser-stable, curl, dbus, djvulibre, glib2.0, glibc, gnupg2, httpie, libreoffice, libssh2, mosquitto, nginx, python-sqlalchemy, unbound, and zipios++), openSUSE (bluez, clamav, cpio, freerdp, openafs, phpMyAdmin, strongswan, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (samba and SDL), Scientific Linux (389-ds-base), and SUSE (haproxy, python-Django, and tightvnc).

Version 7.4.0 of the PHP language has been released. New features include typed properties, arrow functions, weak references, and more; see the release announcement and migration guide for more information.

The 5.4.1, 5.3.14, 4.19.87, 4.14.157, 4.9.204, and 4.4.204 stable kernels have all been released; they contain a relatively large set of important fixes and updates. For good measure, 4.9.205 and 4.4.205 followed a full 30 seconds later with one problematic patch reverted.

On the Redox site, creator Jeremy Soller gives an update on the Unix-like operating system written in Rust. It is running on a System76 Galaga Pro laptop: "This particular hardware has full support for the keyboard, touchpad, storage, and ethernet, making it easy to use with Redox." Meanwhile, he and the other Redox developers have been focusing on making it self-hosting: "Building Redox OS on Redox OS has always been one of the highest priorities of the project. Rustc seems to be only a few months of work away, after which I can begin to improve the system while running on it permanently, at least on one machine. With Redox OS being a microkernel, it is possible that even the driver level could be recompiled and respawned without downtime, making it incredibly fast to develop for. With this in place, I would work more efficiently on porting more software and tackling more hardware support issues, such as filling in the USB stack and adding graphics drivers. But, more importantly than what I will be able to do, is the contributions by others that will be unlocked by having a fully self-hosted, microkernel Operating System written in Rust, Redox OS."

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libvpx and vino), Fedora (grub2 and nss), and SUSE (cloud-init, libarchive, libtomcrypt, ncurses, and ucode-intel).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (haproxy and libvorbis), Fedora (mod_auth_mellon and xen), Oracle (389-ds-base, kernel, and tcpdump), SUSE (bsdtar, java-11-openjdk, java-1_7_0-openjdk, and libxml2), and Ubuntu (nss and python-psutil).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (bsdiff, libvpx, tiff, and xmlrpc-epi), Fedora (freeimage, imapfilter, kernel, mingw-freeimage, and thunderbird), openSUSE (cups and djvulibre), Oracle (SDL), SUSE (ardana-db, ardana-keystone, ardana-neutron, ardana-nova, crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, crowbar-ui, openstack-barbican, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-keystone, openstack-neutron, openstack-neutron-gbp, openstack-neutron-lbaas, openstack-nova, openstack-octavia, openstack-sahara, python-psutil, release-notes-suse-openstack-cloud, freerdp, mailman, and slurm), and Ubuntu (ruby2.3, ruby2.5).

The Linux kernel scheduler is a complicated beast and a lot of effort goes into improving it during every kernel release cycle. The 5.4 kernel release includes a few improvements to the existing SCHED_IDLE scheduling policy that can help users improve the scheduling latency of their high-priority (interactive) tasks if they use the SCHED_IDLE policy for the lowest-priority (background) tasks. Read on for a description of this work contributed by Viresh Kumar.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxdmcp, nss, php-imagick, and ruby2.1), openSUSE (java-11-openjdk), Red Hat (389-ds-base, kernel, kernel-rt, python-jinja2, qemu-kvm-ma, and tcpdump), SUSE (bluez, clamav, cpio, cups, gcc9, libpng16, libssh2_org, mailman, sqlite3, squid, strongswan, tiff, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (redmine).

Stable kernels 5.3.13, 4.19.86, 4.14.156, 4.9.203, and 4.4.203 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, enigmail, isc-dhcp, libice, libofx, and pam-python), Fedora (chromium, ghostscript, mingw-cfitsio, mingw-gdal, mingw-libidn2, and rsyslog), Gentoo (adobe-flash, chromium, expat, and firefox), openSUSE (apache2-mod_perl, haproxy, java-11-openjdk, and ncurses), Oracle (ghostscript, kernel, php:7.2, php:7.3, and sudo), Red Hat (chromium-browser, python27-python, and SDL), and Ubuntu (dpdk and libvpx).

Linus has released the 5.4 kernel. "Not a lot happened this last week, which is just how I like it". Significant features in this release include the haltpoll CPU governor, the iocost (formerly io.weight) I/O controller, the EROFS filesystem, an implementation of the exFAT filesystem that may yet be superseded by a better version, the fs-verity file integrity mechanism, support for the BPF compile once, run everywhere mechanism, the dm-clone device mapper target, the virtiofs filesystem, kernel lockdown support (at last), kernel symbol namespaces, and a new random-number generator meant to solve the early-boot entropy problem. See the KernelNewbies 5.4 page for a lot more details.