Linux Weekly News

KeePassXC is an open-source (GPLv3), cross-platform password manager with local-only data storage. The project comes with a number of build options that can be used to toggle optional features, such as browser integration and password database sharing. However, controversy ensued when Debian Developer Julian Klode decided to make use of these compile flags to disable these features to improve security in the keepassxc package uploaded to Debian unstable for the upcoming Debian 13 ("Trixie") release.

Version 3.20.0 of the Alpine Linux distribution has been released with initial support for 64-bit RISC-V. Other important changes include updates to GNOME 46, KDE Plasma 6, and replacing Redis with Valkey due to Redis's adoption of a non-free license model. See the release notes for more on this release.

Vineeth Pillai gave a remote talk at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit explaining how BPF could be used to improve the performance of virtual machines (VMs). Pillai has a patch set designed to let guest and host machines share scheduling information in order to eliminate some of the overhead of running in a VM. The assembled developers had several comments on the design, but seemed overall to approve of the prospect.

The AlmaLinux project has announced the formation of the AlmaLinux Engineering Steering Committee (ALESCo):

The initial members of ALESCo appointed by the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board are Andrew Lukoshko, Ben Thomas, Cody Robertson, Elkhan Mammadli, Jonathan Wright, and Neal Gompa. The AlmaLinux Wiki has more information on the committee's activities and how to get involved.

David Vernet kicked off the BPF track at 2024's BPF track at the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit with a talk about polymorphic kfuncs — or, with less jargon, kernel functions that can be called from BPF which use different implementations depending on context. He explained how this would be useful to the sched_ext BPF scheduling framework, but expected it to be helpful in other areas as well.

As the shiny new KDE Plasma 6 desktop makes its way into distribution releases, a small group of developers is still trying to preserve the KDE experience circa 2008. The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), is a continuation of KDE 3 that has maintained the old-school desktop with semi-regular releases since 2010. The most recent release, R14.1.2, was announced on April 28. TDE does deliver a usable retro desktop, but with some limitations that hamper its usability on modern systems.

Bundles are multiple buffers used in a single operation. On the receive side, this means a single receive may utilize multiple buffers, reducing the roundtrip through the networking stack from N per N buffers to just a single one. On the send side, this also enables better handling of how an application deals with sends from a socket, eliminating the need to serialize sends on a single socket. Bundles work with provided buffers, hence this feature also adds support for provided buffers for send operations.

Working on the Linux kernel has always been unlike working on many other software projects. One particularly noticeable difference is the decentralized nature of the kernel's testing infrastructure. Projects such as syzkaller, KernelCI, or the kernel self tests test the kernel in different ways. On February 28, Helen Koike posted a patch set that would add continuous integration (CI) scripts for the whole kernel. The response was generally positive, but several people suggested changes.