Linux Weekly News

The release of Rust 1.89 has been announced. Changes this time include support for inferring the length of certain arrays, lint messages suggesting how to clarify potentially confusing uses of lifetime elision in function signatures, and improvements to the C ABI. The full changelog is also available.

• Front: Don't fear the TPM; Python performance; Offensive Debian packages; NNCPNET; 6.17 Merge window; Transparent huge pages; SilverBullet.
• Briefs: AUR malware; Secure boot; kbuild and kconfig maintenance; GPU drivers; NVIDIA on AlmaLinux; Proxmox 9.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

The AlmaLinux project has announced the availability of packages to enable native NVIDIA driver support, including CUDA and Secure Boot, for AlmaLinux 9 and 10.

Full documentation is available on the AlmaLinux wiki.

The starting point is to understand that a kernel-mode GPU driver connects a much larger UMD (user-mode driver) to the actual GPU. The UMD will actually implement APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and others. These APIs, in turn, will be used by actual programs to describe their workload to the GPU. This includes allocating and using not only the geometry and textures, but also the shaders being used to process said data into the final result. This means that a key aspect of GPU drivers is actually allocating GPU memory to house data related to the current scene being drawn so that it can actually be operated on by the hardware.

There is a great deal of misunderstanding, and some misinformation, about the Trusted Platform Module (TPM); to combat this, Debian developer Jonathan McDowell would like to clear the air and help users understand what it is good for, as well as what it's not. At DebConf25 in Brest, France, he delivered a talk about TPMs that explained what they are, why people might be interested in using them, and how users might do so on a Debian system.

Thanks are due to Yamada for all that work, and to Chancellor and Schier for stepping up. Hopefully a way will be found to better support these important subsystems in the near future.

Proxmox Virtual Environment 9.0, based on Debian 13 ("trixie"), has been released. Notable new features include snapshots for thick-provisioned LVM shared storage, affinity rules for high availability (HA) clusters, and a modernized mobile web interface for managing Proxmox systems. See the release notes and known issues for more details about the release.

The call for topics for the Kernel Summit, which runs as a Linux Plumbers Conference track, is also out.

A pair of packages containing fortune "cookies" that were deemed offensive have been removed from the upcoming Debian 13 ("trixie") release. This has, of course, led to a lengthy discussion and debate about what does, or does not, belong in the distribution. It may also lead to a general resolution (GR) to decide whether Debian's code of conduct (CoC) applies to the contents of packages.

Running a modern mail server is a complicated business. In part, this complication is caused by the series of incrementally developed practices designed to combat the huge flood of spam that dominates modern email communication. An unfortunate side effect is that it prevents people from running their own mail servers, concentrating people on a few big providers. NNCPNET is a suite of software written by John Goerzen based on the node-to-node copy (NNCP) protocol that aims to make running one's own mail servers as easy as it once was. While the default configurations communicates only with other NNCPNET servers, there is a public relay that connects the system to the broader internet mail ecosystem.

Linuxiac reports that another malicious package has been uploaded to the Arch User Repository (AUR). This time around the package was google-chrome-stable, which installed a remote-access trojan along with Google Chrome.

The Arch Linux project had to warn users about a similar attack less than a month ago when a user uploaded three browser packages that also installed a malicious script identified as a remote-access trojan.