Linux Weekly News

Version 2.48.0 of the Git source-code management system has been released. There is a long list of incremental improvements and bug fixes; see the announcement and the highlights blog from GitHub for details.

Paolo used to describe himself as a simple practitioner of software development, one of whose missions was to contribute a free real-time system his students could use, study and improve for their research work at the university, welcoming others to join. Many Linux users and businesses owe him a lot, because under his leadership, the RTAI project has always defended the freedom of developers to implement real-time systems, particularly at times when it was threatened. His fierce will for RTAI served the Xenomai project, as well as others.

He will be missed. (LWN interviewed Mantegazza in 2001).

The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At VimConf 2024 in November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a keynote on "the new Vim project" that detailed how the community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what the future looks like.

Automattic has announced that it is reallocating its resources away from contributing to the WordPress project as a response to the WP Engine lawsuit:

LWN last covered the ongoing WordPress saga in December. [Thanks to Paul Wise for the heads-up on this latest development.]

After yesterday's stable kernel releases, Chris Clayton reported a build problem with 6.6.70, which prompted Greg Kroah-Hartman to release 6.6.71 to fix it.

Most of the time, programmers do not need to worry much about provenance, and it is very clear how a pointer got derived. However, when casting pointers to integers and back, the provenance of the resulting pointer is underspecified. With this release, Rust is adding a set of APIs that can in many cases replace the use of integer-pointer-casts, and therefore avoid the ambiguities inherent to such casts. In particular, the pattern of using the lowest bits of an aligned pointer to store extra information can now be implemented without ever casting a pointer to an integer or back. This makes the code easier to reason about, easier to analyze for the compiler, and also benefits tools like Miri and architectures like CHERI that aim to detect and diagnose pointer misuse.

Historically, lawsuits have focused on the copyrights licensed under GPL (or the GPL and LGPL together). Steck's lawsuit uniquely focused exclusively on users' rights under the LGPL. Steck's work showed that despite being a "Lesser" license than GPL, LGPLv2.1 still guarantees users the right to repair, modify and reinstall modified versions of the software on their device. There is now no doubt that both GPL and LGPL mandate the device owner's ability to make changes to the software in the flash memory so those changes persist across reboots.

• Front: What to expect in 2025; Sequoia; Emacs in Scheme; Pony; Homa; 2024 Timeline.
• Briefs: Colliding SHAs; netdev in 2024; Gentoo retrospective; LineageOS 22.1; pkgsrc-2024Q4; RIP Steve Langasek; Firefox 134.0; Algol 68; Ruby 3.4; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The Sequoia OpenPGP library has been in development for some time. LWN covered the library in 2020. Now the project's command-line interface has been released. The sq tool offers a promising alternative to the venerable GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) tool — albeit one with a different interface, set of terminology, and approach to the web of trust. Several distributions are making increasing use of the tool behind the scenes.

The Tor Project has published a review of major milestones from 2024, including merging with the Tails project, work to enable human-friendly .onion addresses, and the launch of WebTunnel:

The pkgsrc developers have announced the 2024Q4 branch of the pkgsrc cross-platform packaging system. It is the default package manager for NetBSD, SmartOS, and is available for Linux as well. This marks the 85th quarterly release of pkgsrc:

Work on relieving the rtnl_lock pressure has continued throughout the year. The rtnl_lock is often mentioned as one of the biggest global locks in the kernel, as it protects all of the network configuration and state. The efforts can be divided into two broad categories – converting read operations to rely on RCU protection or other fine grained locking (v6.9, v6.10), and splitting the lock into per-network namespace locks (preparations for which started in v6.13).

Gentoo Linux has published a project retrospective that looks at the major improvements and news from 2024, the Gentoo Foundation's finances, and contributions to Gentoo by the numbers.

The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2024, with a 2.4% increase from 121000 to 123942. The number of commits by external contributors has grown strongly from 10708 to 12812, now across 421 unique external authors.

The importance of GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point for potential developers, is clearly increasing as well. We have had 7517 commits in 2024, a strong growth from 5045 in 2023. The number of contributors to GURU has increased a lot as well, from 158 in 2023 to 241 in 2024. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software.

In the past, LWN had a tradition of publishing a timeline of notable events from the previous year in early January. We thought we might try reviving that tradition in 2025 to see if our readers find it useful. While we have covered these events as they happened, it's interesting to see how much has taken place in just 12 months.

Version 134.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include support for touchpad hold gestures on Linux, a refreshed layout for the New Tab page for users in the US and Canada, and improved support for debugging web extensions.