Linux Weekly News

The systemd v257 release brings a number of incremental enhancements to various components and utilities for working with Linux systems. This includes more support for varlink, automated downloading of disk images at boot time, and a number of improvements to the secure-boot process for unified kernel images (UKIs), which we have covered in a separate article.

The systemd project has been working for some time on promoting unified kernel images (UKIs), a format that bundles a kernel, initial disk image, kernel command line, and other associated data into a single file. The advantage of the format is the ability to authenticate the entire collection with secure boot, which makes it easier for end users to know that their operating system hasn't been tampered with. The downside is the lack of flexibility and increase in disk usage, since all of the things packaged in a UKI must be updated together. But the recent systemd 257 release (along with other changes to be covered in a future article) includes some major changes to the UKI format, and the rest of the boot process, that partially mitigate those downsides. The release also includes improvements for hardware-locked disk encryption, which may also help secure some computers.

The Fedora Project has announced the results of the Fedora Linux 41 election cycle. Five seats were open on the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo), and the winners are Kevin Fenzi, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek, David Cantrell, Tomáš Hrčka, and Fabio Alessandro Locati. One seat was open on the Mindshare Committee and that went to Luis Bazan as the only eligible candidate nominated in this period.

Version 5.0.0 of the darktable photography workflow application has been released. Major changes in this release include user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX) improvements, speed improvements for bulk operations, and the addition of a inter-script-communication event to allow a running script to send messages to another running script. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022.

While the experiment itself is deemed a failure, I think we learned from it and improved curl in the process. We had to rethink and reassess several implementation details when we aligned HTTP behavior with hyper. libcurl parses and handles HTTP stricter now. Better.

Version 2024.12 of the Debian-based Grml live Linux system for system administrators has been released. Grml 2024.12 uses packages from the upcoming Debian 13 ("trixie") release. It drops support for 32-bit x86 PCs and gains support for 64-bit ARM CPUs. See the release notes for a full list of changes and new features.

The Fedora Engineering Steering Council (FESCo) has made a series of missteps in deciding to revoke a longtime Fedora contributor's provenpackager status. FESCo made the decision during a closed session, based on private complaints. It then publicly announced its decision, including the contributor's name, while only supplying a vague account of the contributor's actions. This has left the Fedora community with more questions than answers, and raised a number of complaints about the transparency of FESCo's process. In addition, the sequence of events has sparked discussions about package ownership, as well as when and how it's appropriate to push changes to packages that a developer doesn't own.