Hírolvasó

[$] New horizons for Julia

7 hónap 2 hét óta
Julia, a free, general-purpose programming language aimed at science, engineering, and related arenas of technical computing, has steadily improved and widened its scope of application since its initial public release in 2012. As part of its 1.11 release from late 2024, Julia made several inroads into areas outside of its traditional focus, provided its users with advances in tooling, and has seen several improvements in performance and programmer convenience. These recent developments in and around Julia go a long way to answer several longstanding complaints from both new and experienced users. We last looked in on the language one year ago, for its previous major release, Julia 1.10.
jake

[$] A look at the openSUSE board election

7 hónap 2 hét óta

The election to replace outgoing openSUSE board members is underway, with four candidates vying for three seats. The election was initially scheduled to be completed in December, but the timeline was extended due to too few candidates standing for the seats. Voting closes on February 2 and the results are expected to be announced on February 3.

jzb

The Linux Foundation on global regulations and sanctions

7 hónap 2 hét óta
The Linux Foundation has published its long-awaited article on international sanctions and open-source development. This is the reasoning that went into the removal of a group of Russian kernel maintainers in October.

It is disappointing that the open source community cannot operate independently of international sanctions programs, but these sanctions are the law of each country and are not optional. Many developers work on open source projects in their spare time, or for fun. Dealing with U.S. and international sanctions was unlikely on the list of things that most (or very likely any) open source developers thought they were signing up for. We hope that in time relevant authorities will clarify that open source and standards activities may continue unabated. Until that time, however, with the direct and indirect sponsorship of developers by companies, the intersection of sanctions on corporate entities leaves us in a place where we cannot ignore the potential risks.

corbet

Security updates for Friday

7 hónap 2 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (libsoup), Debian (debian-security-support and redis), Fedora (expat, java-21-openjdk, lemonldap-ng, and phpMyAdmin), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable and git-lfs), Oracle (bzip2, git-lfs, libsoup, mariadb:10.11, mariadb:10.5, python-jinja2, redis, and unbound), Red Hat (git-lfs, libsoup, python-jinja2, rsync, and unbound), SUSE (buildah, chromium, google-osconfig-agent, govulncheck-vulndb, hauler, ignition, krb5, libxml2, python311-pydantic, SDL2_sound, and trivy), and Ubuntu (jquery, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-5.15, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-oracle, and mysql-8.0).
daroc

[$] Resistance to Rust abstractions for DMA mapping

7 hónap 2 hét óta
While the path toward the ability to write device drivers in Rust has been anything but smooth, steady progress has been made and that goal is close to being achieved — for some types of drivers at least. Device drivers need to be able to set up memory areas for direct memory access (DMA) transfers, though; that means Rust drivers will need a set of abstractions to interface with the kernel's DMA-mapping subsystem. Those abstractions have run into resistance that has the potential to block progress on the Rust-for-Linux project as a whole.
corbet

Freedesktop looking for new home for its GitLab instance

7 hónap 2 hét óta
Visitors to the freedesktop.org GitLab instance are currently being greeted with a message noting that the company who has been hosting it for free for nearly five years, Equinix, has asked that it be moved (or start being paid for) by the end of April. The issue ticket opened by Benjamin Tissoires in order to track the planning of a move is clear that the project is grateful for the gift: "First, I'd like to thank Equinix Metal for the years of support they gave us. They were very kind and generous with us and even if it's a shame we have to move out on a short notice, all things come to an end."

The current cost for the services, much of which is for 50TB of bandwidth data transfer per month and a half-dozen beefy servers for running continuous-integration (CI) jobs, comes to around $24,000 per month. Tissoires believes that the project should start paying for service somewhere, in order to avoid upheaval of this sort, sometimes on short or no notice. "I personally think we better have fd.o pay for its own servers, and then have sponsors chip in. This way, when a sponsor goes away, it's technically much simpler to just replace the money than change datacenter." Various options are being discussed there, but any move is likely to disrupt normal services for a week or more.

jake

Security updates for Thursday

7 hónap 2 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (redis:7), Debian (bind9, chromium, flightgear, pam-u2f, and simgear), Red Hat (fence-agents, git-lfs, libsoup, python3.9, rsync, and traceroute), Slackware (bind), SUSE (apache2-mod_security2, corepack22, go1.24, hplip, ignition, iperf, kernel, kernel-devel-longterm, nginx, nodejs22, openvpn, owasp-modsecurity-crs, and shadow), and Ubuntu (bind9, jinja2, libxml2, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, php7.0, tomcat6, and vlc).
jake

Thunderbird moving to monthly updates in March

7 hónap 2 hét óta

The Thunderbird project has announced that it is making its Release channel the default download beginning with the 135.0 release in March. This will move users to major monthly releases instead of the annual major Extended Support Release (ESR) that is the current default.

One of our goals for 2025 is to increase active installations on the release channel to at least 20% of the total installations. At last check, we had 29,543 active installations on the release channel, compared to 20,918 on beta, and 5,941 on daily. The release channel installations currently account for 0.27% of the 10,784,551 total active installations tracked on stats.thunderbird.net.

jzb