Linux Weekly News

Alexei Starovoitov introduced a patch series for the Linux kernel on February 6 to add bpf_arena, a new type of shared memory between BPF programs and user space. Starovoitov expects arenas to be useful both for bidirectional communication between user space and BPF programs, and for use as an additional heap for BPF programs. This will likely be useful to BPF programs that implement complex data structures directly, instead of relying on the kernel to supply them. Starovoitov cited Google's ghOSt project as an example and inspiration for the work.

With just a single DNS packet, hackers could paralyze all common DNS implementations and public DNS providers. Exploiting this attack would have serious consequences for any application that uses the internet, including the unavailability of technologies such as web browsers, email and instant messaging. This devastating effect prompted major DNS vendors to call KeyTrap "The worst attack on DNS ever discovered"

Some more information and pointers to updates can be found on the CVE-2023-50387 page; some distributors have been faster to get updates out than others.

(Thanks to Dave Täht).

Qubes OS is a security-focused desktop Linux distribution built on Fedora Linux and the Xen hypervisor. Qubes uses virtualization to run applications, system services, and devices access via virtual machines called "qubes" that have varying levels of trust and persistence to provide an open-source "reasonably secure" operating system with "serious privacy". The Qubes 4.2.0 release, from December 2023, brings a number of refinements to make Qubes OS easier to manage and use.

.select_cpu() implements the logic to assign a target CPU to a task that wants to run, typically you have to decide if you want to keep the task on the same CPU or if it needs to be migrated to a different one (for example if the current CPU is busy); if we can find an idle CPU at this stage there's no reason to call the scheduler, the task can be immediately dispatched here.

Drew DeVault announced the first numbered release of the Hare programming language on February 16.

Spritely is a project seeking to build a platform for sovereign distributed applications — applications where users run their own nodes in order to control their own data — as the basis of a new social internet. While there are many such existing projects, Spritely takes an unusual approach based on a new interoperable protocol for efficient, secure remote procedure calls (RPC). The project is in its early stages, with many additional features planned, but it is already possible to play around with Goblins, the distributed actor library that Spritely intends to build on.

The openSUSE News blog looks at the roadmap for Agama (a new installer from the YaST development team) with releases planned for April and July:

The aim of the second milestone is to improve Agama’s flexibility and capabilities for unattended installations, which seeks to position Agama as a formidable alternative to AutoYaST.

The Agama page explains why YaST is due for replacement.

With all that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 14’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s largely UI-based changes in Android 12/13, and Android 14’s dead-simple device bring-up requirements, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 14 much more efficiently.

This lets us spend some much overdue time on our apps suite! Applications such as Aperture had their features and UX improved significantly, while many of our aging apps such as Jelly, Dialer, Contacts, Messaging, LatinIME (Keyboard), and Calculator got near full redesigns that bring them into the Material You era!

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter carries the sad news that long-time contributor Gunnar Hjalmarsson has passed away. Gunnar has been a steadfast contributor to Ubuntu and Debian for well over a decade. His work around translation and localization efforts has helped enable people from around the world to use and enjoy the software that we all love. It goes without saying that people like Gunnar are the foundation of our community, and his passing is a tremendous loss.