Linux Weekly News

The FreeBSD Foundation has published a set of reports from the May 2024 FreeBSD Developer Summit held in Ottawa, Canada. The topics include FreeBSD Core Team updates, FreeBSD 15 release planning, Integration with Rust, and OCI containers on FreeBSD:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced the addition of three new members to its board: John Gilmore, Christina Haralanova, and Maria Chiara Pievatolo. This is part of FSF governance changes announced in January 2023. The next step is a review of current board members:

More information on the process, and a short biography of each new board member, is available in the full announcement.

An upgrade from Python 3.11 to 3.12 has led to the rejection of some Python apps by Apple's app stores. That led to Eric Froemling submitting a bug report against CPython. That, in turn, led to an interesting discussion among Python developers about how far the project was willing to go to accommodate app store review processes. Developers reached a quick consensus, and a solution that may arrive as soon as Python 3.13.

The 6.9.7, 6.6.36, and 6.1.96 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains an important set of fixes.

The openSUSE project has announced Leap Micro version 6.0. Leap Micro is an image-based, lightweight Linux distribution that is designed to run containerized and virtualized applications. It is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Micro. Changes in this release include the support for full-disk encryption, the addition of Cockpit for web-based system management, and an optional real-time kernel for x86_64. Boot support for legacy BIOS on x86_64 is deprecated with 6.0, and will be removed in a later release. See the SLE Micro release notes for more information.

Peter Hutterer has written a summary of "papercut fixes" for GNOME tablet support that are planned to ship with GNOME 47.

If you're an avid tablet user, you may have multiple stylus tools - but it's also likely that you have multiple tools of the same type which makes differentiating them in the GUI hard. Which is why they're highlighted now - if you bring the tool into proximity, the matching image is highlighted to make it easier to know which stylus you're about to configure. Oh, and in the process we added a new SVG for AES styli too to make the picture look more like the actual physical tool. The <blink> tag may no longer be cool but at least we can disco our way through the stylus configuration now.

There has been a lot of work on the next-generation trait solver. The initiative posted a separate update at the end of last year. While we would have liked to stabilize its use in coherence a few months ago, this surfaced additional small behavior regressions and hangs, causing delays. We are working on fixing these issues and intend to merge the stabilization PR soon. We are getting close to compiling the standard library and the compiler with the new solver enabled everywhere, after which will be able to run crater to figure out the remaining issues.

Unison is a MIT-licensed programming language, in development since 2013, that explores the ramifications of making code immutable and stored in a database, instead of a set of text files. Unison supports a greatly simplified model for distributed programming — one that describes the configuration of and communication between programs in the same language as the programs themselves. Along the way, it introduces a new approach to interfacing with programming languages, which is tailored to its design.

Version 4.8.0 of the darktable photo editor has been released. Changes include performance improvements for large collections, addition of more EXIF fields in the image information module, and two new modules for image composition: Enlarge Canvas and Overlay. Enlarge Canvas allows adding areas to an image, while Overlay allows adding new content by overlaying pixels from the current image or another image. LWN last looked at darktable in 2022. Users are "strongly advised" to make a backup of their configuration and library before upgrading, as they will not be compatible with darktable 4.6.

Dan Walsh, Stef Walter, and Colin Walters all walk into a presentation and Walter asks, "why would you want to boot your containers?" This isn't the setup for some technology joke, this is part of the trio's keynote at DevConf.cz in Brno, Czech Republic on June 14 about bootable containers (bootc). The talk, which was streamed to YouTube for those of us who didn't attend DevConf.cz in person, provided a solid overview of bootc and the problems it is intended to solve. The idea behind bootc is to make creating operating-system images just as easy as creating application-container images while using the same tools.

It is not yet clear how many of these models will fit the EU's definition of open source. Under the act, this would refer to models that are released under a "free and open" licence that, for example, allows users to modify a model but says nothing about access to training data. Refining this definition will probably form "a single pressure point that will be targeted by corporate lobbies and big companies", the paper says.

In a particular situation, when each scheduling policy needs its specific action, the core kernel scheduler calls an operation defined in struct sched_class. For example, when the core kernel scheduler needs to select a task to be scheduled, it calls the sched_class.pick_next_task(rq) callback of a concrete scheduling policy. When a task becomes runnable, the core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.enqueue(rq, p, flags) so the concrete scheduling policy enqueues task p to run queue rq. When a task's runtime state needs to be updated, the core kernel scheduler calls sched_class.update_curr(rq).