Linux Weekly News

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 19, 2023 is available.

Open-source hardware (or open hardware) refers to hardware that is developed in a manner similar to open-source software. There's a widely accepted definition of open-source hardware, but it is probably not as well known as its open-source-software counterpart. In addition, there is a popular certification program that hardware makers can use to indicate which of their devices meets that criteria. But there are some vendors that are showing more enthusiasm than others in participating in the process—or in producing open hardware at all.

The GNOME Foundation has announced the hiring of Holly Million as its new executive director.

Holly is a multi-talented individual with a diverse background in nonprofit leadership, filmmaking, teaching, public speaking, and writing. Her commitment to empowering individuals to make a positive impact aligns perfectly with the values and goals of the GNOME Foundation.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (slurm-wlm), Fedora (icecat and python-configobj), Oracle (dotnet6.0, kernel-container, nginx, nginx:1.20, nginx:1.22, and python3.9), Red Hat (bind9.16, curl, dotnet6.0, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, nghttp2, nodejs, python-reportlab, and virt:rhel), Slackware (util), SUSE (buildah, conmon, erlang, glibc, kernel, nghttp2, opensc, python-urllib3, samba, slurm, and suse-module-tools), and Ubuntu (frr, linux-azure, and pmix).

The Linux kernel has supported restartable sequences (sometimes referred to as "RSEQ") since 2018, but it remains a bit of a niche feature, mostly useful to performance-oriented developers who do not mind writing assembly code. According to Mathieu Desnoyers, the developer behind the kernel's implementation of restartable sequences, this feature can be applicable to a much wider range of performance-sensitive code with proper library support. He came to the 2023 GNU Tools Cauldron to present the case for use of restartable sequences within the GNU C Library (glibc).

Security updates have been issued by Debian (axis, nghttp2, node-babel7, and tomcat9), Fedora (curl and ghostscript), Oracle (bind, kernel-container, mariadb:10.5, and python3.11), Red Hat (.NET 7.0, go-toolset, golang, and go-toolset:rhel8), SUSE (kernel, libcue, libxml2, python-Django, and python-gevent), and Ubuntu (curl, ghostscript, iperf3, libcue, python2.7, quagga, and samba).

OpenBSD 7.4 is out. Changes include a new kqueue1() system call that allows close-on-exec behavior, support for better arm64 control-flow integrity, support for TCP segmentation offloading, and much more.

Following up from last year's first Image-Based Linux Summit), a second meeting was held in Berlin on September 12th, 2023, the day before All Systems Go! 2023, at the Microsoft office. The goal of these summits is to find common ground among stakeholders from various engineering groups around the topic of image-based Linux distributions, communicate progress, and attempt to build a strategy to tackle shared problems together. The organizers — Luca Boccassi, Lennart Poettering, and Christian Brauner — welcomed participants from the UAPI Group, which draws developers from a long list of companies with an interest in this area, and spent the full day discussing a variety of topics. Full minutes have been published on the UAPI Group’s web site.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (batik, poppler, and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, composer, curl, emacs, ghostscript, libwebp, libXpm, netatalk, nghttp2, python-asgiref, python-django, and webkitgtk), Mageia (curl and libX11), Oracle (bind, busybox, firefox, and kernel), Red Hat (curl, dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, and nginx), SUSE (chromium, cni, cni-plugins, grub2, netatalk, opensc, opera, and wireshark), and Ubuntu (iperf3).

The 6.6-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So the previous week has been pretty calm, and a lot of the discussion has been about future changes as so often happens late in the release cycle."

The 6.1.58 stable kernel update has been released; it consists mostly of a handful of reverts in the NFS subsystem.

The primary job of a compiler is to translate source code into a binary form that can be run by a computer. Increasingly, though, developers want more from their tools, compilers included. Since the compiler must understand the code it is being asked to translate, it is in a good position to provide information about how that code will execute — and where things might go wrong. At the 2023 GNU Tools Cauldron, David Malcolm talked about recent work to improve the diagnostic output from the GCC compiler.

Version 23.10 of the Ubuntu distribution is out. Changes include support for hardware-backed full-disk encryption, tighter control over user namespaces, a new App Center application, and more.

Version 23.05.0 of the OpenWrt distribution has been released: "OpenWrt 23.05 supports over 1790 devices. Support for over 200 new devices was added in addition to the device support by OpenWrt 22.03". Along with new device support, this release features a switch to the mbedtls cryptographic library, the ability to include utilities written in Rust, an updated toolchain, and more.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, tomcat9, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, grafana-pcp, libcue, mbedtls, samba, and vim), Oracle (kernel, libvpx, and thunderbird), Red Hat (bind and galera, mariadb), SUSE (exiv2, go1.20, go1.21, and kernel), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg).

The Civil Infrastructure Platform project has announced that it will be maintaining the 6.1 kernel for a minimum of ten years past its initial release (and, thus, through 2032).

CIP kernels are maintained like regular long-term-stable (LTS) kernels, and developers of the CIP kernel are also involved in LTS kernel review and testing. While regular LTS kernels are moving back to 2 years maintenance, CIP kernels are set up for 10 years. In order to enable this extended lifetime, CIP kernels are scoped-down in actively supported kernel features and target architecture. At the same time, CIP kernels accept non-invasive backports from newer mainline kernels that enable new hardware.

Programs running in the BPF machine can, depending on how they are attached, perform a number of privileged operations; the ability to load and run those programs, thus, must be a privileged operation in its own right. Almost since the beginning of the extended-BPF era, developers have struggled to find a way to allow users to run the programs they need without giving away more privilege than is necessary. Earlier this year, the idea of a BPF token ran into some opposition from security-oriented developers. Andrii Nakryiko has since returned with an updated patch set that significantly increases the granularity of the privileges that can be conferred with a BPF token.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libcue, org-mode, python3.7, and samba), Fedora (libcue, oneVPL, oneVPL-intel-gpu, and xen), Mageia (glibc), Oracle (glibc, kernel, libssh2, libvpx, nodejs, and python-reportlab), Slackware (libcaca), SUSE (gsl, ImageMagick, kernel, opensc, python-urllib3, qemu, rage-encryption, samba, and xen), and Ubuntu (curl and samba).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 12, 2023 is available.

While the vulnerability itself is pretty run-of-the-mill, the recently disclosed GNOME vulnerability has a number of interesting facets. The problem lies in a library that reads files in a fairly obscure format, but it turns out that files in that format are routinely—automatically—processed by GNOME if they are downloaded to the local system. That turns a vulnerability in a largely unknown library into a one-click remote-code-execution flaw for the GNOME desktop.