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We’re happy to announce that registration for LPC 2024 is now open. To register please go to our attend page.

To try to prevent the instant sellout we had in previous years we are keeping our cancellation policy of no refunds, only transfers of registrations. You will find more details during the registration process. LPC 2024 follows the Linux Foundation’s health & safety policy.

As usual we expect to sell our rather quickly so don’t delay your registration for too long!

Az ország harmadik iparági-támogatási programja egyben az eddigi legnagyobb összegű.

Linus has released 6.10-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. For reasons that have not been spelled out, the codename for the release has been changed to "Baby Opossum Posse".

Br OS is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. It is designed as an intuitive, easy-to-use, general-purpose operating system for web navigation and content creation, providing a selection of useful applications for daily use.

The 6.9.2, 6.8.11, 6.6.32, 6.1.92, 5.15.160, 5.10.218, 5.4.277, and 4.19.315 stable kernel updates have all been released. Each contains an important set of fixes. Users of those kernels should upgrade.

Using huge pages has been known for years to improve the performance of many workloads. But traditional huge pages, often sized by the CPU at 2MB, can be difficult to allocate and can waste memory due to internal fragmentation. Driven by both the folio transition and hardware improvements, attention to smaller, multi-size transparent huge pages (mTHPs) has been on the rise. In two memory-management-track sessions at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, developers discussed the kernel's ability to reliably allocate mTHPs and the performance gains that result.

Future versions of OpenBSD may include core system libraries and binaries built with logic to remove return addresses off the stack. With this in place, whole classes of bugs would be harder to exploit.

In a message to the tech@ mailing list titled clang -fret-clean: cleaning return addresses off stack, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) explains how this would work and includes code to implement the feature for the X86 architecture only:

List: openbsd-tech Subject: clang -fret-clean: cleaning return addresses off stack From: "Theo de Raadt" <deraadt () openbsd ! org> Date: 2024-05-25 6:18:59 There are many address space mitigations in play now which make standard control-flow methods and ROP-style methods more difficult than ever before. None of them are a silver bullet; added up they are a big deal, but noone is saying they are a comprehensive solution, One thing I've worried about for a while is that program bugs being exercised tend to happen in the main program, or in some large library. But many types of attack methodology require reaching system calls via libc, in as direct and simple fashion as possible. ASLR location of libc has made that a bit harder, boot-time random relinking of libc makes it even more difficult. But there's a few things which do hint at where libc is mapped.

Read more…

John Garry and Ted Ts'o led a discussion about supporting atomic writes for buffered I/O, without any torn (or partial) writes to the device, at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. It is something of a continuation of a discussion at last year's summit. The goal is to help PostgreSQL, which writes its data using 16KB buffered I/O; it currently has to do a lot of extra work to ensure that its data is safe on disk. A promise of non-torn, 16KB buffered writes would allow the database to avoid doing double writes.

The original Linux kernel, posted in 1991, ran on a system with a 4KB page size. Over 30 years later, most of us are still running on systems with 4KB pages, even though the amount of installed memory has grown by a few orders of magnitude. It is generally accepted that using large page sizes results in better performance for most applications, but allocating larger pages is often difficult. During a memory-management session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Yu Zhao presented his ideas on improving the allocation of huge pages in the kernel.

Kui-Feng Lee spoke early in the BPF track at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit about some of the recent improvements to BPF. These changes were largely driven by the sched_ext work that David Vernet had covered in the previous talk. Lee focused on changes relevant to struct_ops programs, but several of those changes apply to all BPF programs.

Ultramarine Linux is a Fedora-based distribution featuring extra package repositories such as RPM Fusion and enabling multimedia codecs. Ultramarine can be considered a spiritual successor to Korora Project and aims to make Fedora a more desktop-friendly experience.

4MLinux is a miniature Linux distribution focusing on four capabilities: maintenance (as a system rescue live CD), multimedia (for playing video DVDs and other multimedia files), miniserver (using the inetd daemon), and mystery (providing several small Linux games). The distribution includes support for booting on UEFI-enabled machines.

MX Linux, a desktop-oriented Linux distribution based on Debian's "Stable" branch, is a cooperative venture between the antiX and former MEPIS Linux communities. Using Xfce as the default desktop (with separate KDE Plasma and Fluxbox editions also available), it is a mid-weight operating system designed to combine an elegant and efficient desktop with simple configuration, high stability, solid performance and medium-sized footprint.

Elive, or Enlightenment live CD, is a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution and live CD featuring the Enlightenment window manager. Besides being pre-configured and ready for daily desktop use, it also includes "Elpanel" - a control centre for easy system and desktop administration.

GhostBSD is a user-friendly desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Its default desktop is MATE, but a separate community edition with Xfce is available too. It also features a selection of commonly used software, a rolling-release development model, and a bootable live image with an intuitive graphical system installer.

Alpine Linux is a community developed operating system designed for routers, firewalls, VPNs, VoIP boxes, containers, and servers. It was designed with security in mind; it has proactive security features like PaX and SSP that prevent security holes in the software to be exploited. The C library used is musl and the base tools are all in BusyBox. Those are normally found in embedded systems and are smaller than the tools found in GNU/Linux systems.

With the release of Fedora 40 it's time to start looking ahead to what Fedora 41 has in store. One of the largest changes planned for the next release is a switch to DNF5, a C++ rewrite of the DNF package manager. A previous attempt to make the switch, during the Fedora 39 cycle, was called off, and deferred to Fedora 41. The developers have had nearly a year to address compatibility problems and bring DNF5 to a state suitable to replace DNF4. Signs point to a successful switch in the upcoming release, though there may be a few surprises lurking for Fedora users.

The kernel contains a pair of related filesystems that, among other things, can be used for shared-memory applications; shmem is an internal mechanism used within the kernel, while the tmpfs filesystem is mounted and accessible from user space. As is the case elsewhere in the kernel, these subsystems would benefit from the addition of large-folio support. During a joint storage, filesystem, and memory-management session at the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Daniel Gomez talked about the work he is doing to add that support.

This Graphite blog post retells the history of the BitKeeper fiasco and the dawn of the Git era.

When we think of history, we often romanticize it as being born of a sudden stroke of inspiration. But the creation of git shows the far harsher reality of invention: a slowly escalating disagreement over a license; the need for a scrappy backup solution to unblock work; and then continued polishing and iteration through years and years, led not by the inventor, but rather a community.

For those who weren't around in those days, a perusal of the LWN coverage from the time might be of interest too, including:

• Our first mention of BitKeeper in October 1998
• Not quite open source, 1999
• Linus tries out BitKeeper, 2002
• The free software community and proprietary packages, 2002
• The kernel and BitKeeper part ways, 2005
• How Tridge reverse engineered BitKeeper, 2005
• The guts of Git, 2005

...and a lot more for those who care to search for it.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (chromium, libreoffice, and thunderbird), Red Hat (.NET 7.0, .NET 8.0, gdk-pixbuf2, git-lfs, glibc, python3, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), SUSE (firefox, opensc, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (cjson and gnome-remote-desktop).