Hírolvasó

The 5.14-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Nothing to see here, entirely normal rc4".

The C programming language is famously prone to memory-safety problems that lead to buffer overflows and a seemingly endless stream of security vulnerabilities. But, even in C, it is possible to improve the situation in many cases. One of those is the memcpy() family of functions, which are used to efficiently copy or overwrite blocks of memory; with a bit of help from the compiler, those functions can be prevented from writing past the end of the destination object they are passed. Enforcing that condition in the kernel is harder than one might expect, though, as this massive patch set from Kees Cook shows.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libsndfile and openjdk-11), Fedora (php-pear and seamonkey), openSUSE (fastjar and php7), SUSE (php72, qemu, and sqlite3), and Ubuntu (libsndfile, php-pear, and qpdf).

The change in copyright-assignment policy proposed in June for the GNU C Library project has now been adopted:

The changes to accept patches with or without FSF copyright assignment will be effective after August 2nd, and will apply to all open branches. Code shared with other GNU packages via Gnulib will continue to require assignment to the FSF.

The library will continue to be licensed under the GNU Lesser Public License v2.1 or later.

On its blog, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced a call for white papers about GitHub Copilot and the questions surrounding it. The FSF will pay $500 for papers that it publishes because they "help elucidate the problem": We can see that Copilot's use of freely licensed software has many implications for an incredibly large portion of the free software community. Developers want to know whether training a neural network on their software can really be considered fair use. Others who may be interested in using Copilot wonder if the code snippets and other elements copied from GitHub-hosted repositories could result in copyright infringement. And even if everything might be legally copacetic, activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work.

We are pleased to announce that the System Boot and Security Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. This microconference brings together those that are interested in the firmware, bootloaders, system boot and security. The events around last year’s BootHole showed how crucial platform initialization is for the overall system security. Those events may have showed the shortcomings in the current boot process, but they have also tightened the cooperation between various companies and organizations. Now is the time to use this opportunity to discuss the lessons learned and what can be done to improve in the future. Other cooperation discussions are also welcomed like those based on legal and organizational issues which may hinder working together.

Last year’s meetup achieved the following:

• TrenchBoot AMD: 3mdeb obtained funds from NLNet foundation to contribute to TrenchBoot for AMD platforms. The funding covered various open-source contributions to LandingZone, GRUB2, and Linux kernel
• TrenchBoot Steering Committee was created
• TrenchBoot Steering Committee participate with Arm D-RTM specification working group
• TrenchBoot Intel: Oracle implemented Intel TXT support in the Linux kernel and GRUB; a few version of RFC patches were posted and discussed; the design, except TPM driver in early kernel boot code, is mostly accepted at this point; next version of Linux kernel and GRUB patches are under development.
• GRUB: BootHole and further security developments; new UEFI LoadFile2 boot protocol implementation for GRUB – RFC patches posted; we want to discuss maintenance improvements and free software communities expectations.
• LVFS/fwupd had lots of contributions over last 12 months
  • IT5570 added to the superio plugin
  • Updated ESRT access implementation for FreeBSD
  • uefi-capsule plugin on FreeBSD
  • Add FreeBSD CI
  • Port for BSD distros
  • wip/3mdeb/qubes-wrapper

This year’s topics to be discussed include:

• TPMs, HSMs, secure elements
• Roots of Trust: SRTM and DRTM
• Intel TXT, SGX, TDX
• AMD SKINIT, SEV
• Ways to improve attestation,
• Integrity Measurement Architecture (IMA)
• TrenchBoot, tboot
• UEFI, coreboot, U-Boot, LinuxBoot, hostboot
• Measured Boot, Verified Boot, UEFI Secure Boot, UEFI Secure Boot Advanced Targeting (SBAT)
• shim
• boot loaders: GRUB2, SeaBIOS, network boot, PXE, iPXE
• u-root
• OpenBMC u-bmc
• Legal, organizational and other similar issues relevant for people interested in system boot and security.

Come and join us in the discussion about how to keep your system secure even at bootup.

We hope to see you there.

Filesystem developers tend to disagree with each other about many things, but they are nearly unanimous in their dislike for the truncate() system call, which chops data off the end of a file. Implementing truncate() tends to be full of traps for the unwary — the kind of traps that can lead to lost data. But it turns out that a similar operation, called "hole punching", may be worse. This operation has been subject to difficult-to-hit but real race conditions in many filesystems for years; this patch set from Jan Kara may finally be at a point where it can fill the hole in hole punching.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (webkit2gtk), Fedora (ruby and webkit2gtk3), Mageia (aspell and varnish), openSUSE (git), SUSE (ardana-cobbler, cassandra, cassandra-kit, crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, documentation-suse-openstack-cloud, grafana, kibana, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-monasca-installer, openstack-nova, python-Django, python-elementpath, python-eventlet, python-py, python-pysaml2, python-six, python-xmlschema and git), and Ubuntu (libsndfile, mariadb-10.3, and webkit2gtk).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 29, 2021 is available.

Backlogs in bug triage, code review, and other elements of the development process are nothing new for free-software projects; there is clearly a lot more interest in creating new features (and the bugs that go with them, of course) than in taking on the less-satisfying bits. For a large project like CPython, though, the backlog can seriously impede progress—potentially chasing off contributors whose work falls through the cracks. In order to address that, the Python Software Foundation (PSF) has raised some funds to hire Łukasz Langa as the CPython "Developer-in-Residence". Langa will be working to help clear the backlog, while also looking into other areas of interest to the PSF and the Python steering council.

Stable kernels 5.13.6, 5.10.54, 5.4.136, 4.19.199, 4.14.241, 4.9.277, and 4.4.277 have been released. They all contain important fixes and users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (golang), Mageia (curl, filezilla, jdom/jdom2, netty, pdfbox, perl-Mojolicious, perl-Net-CIDR-Lite, perl-Net-Netmask, python-urllib3, python3, quassel, transfig, and virtualbox), openSUSE (umoci), Red Hat (rh-nodejs12-nodejs and rh-nodejs12-nodejs-nodemon and rh-nodejs14-nodejs and rh-nodejs14-nodejs-nodemon), and SUSE (firefox, glibc, libsndfile, linuxptp, qemu, and umoci).

We are pleased to announce that the Kernel Dependability and Assurance Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference.

Linux development is producing kernels at an ever increasing rate, and at the same time with arguably increasing software quality. The process of kernel development has been adapting to handle the increasing number of contributors over the years to ensure a sufficient software quality. This quality is key in that Linux is now being used in applications that require a high degree of trust that the kernel is going to behave as expected. Some of the key areas we’re seeing Linux start to be used are in medical devices, civil infrastructure, caregiving robots, automotives, etc.

Last year’s miniconference raised awareness about this topic with the wider community. Since then the ELISA team has made contributions to the Documentation and tools. The team has deployed a CI server that runs static analysis tools and syzkaller on the Linux kernel repos and is making the results of last 10 days of linux-next are made available to the community.

This year’s topics to be discussed include:

• Identify missing features that will provide assurance in safety critical systems.
• Which test coverage infrastructures are most effective to provide evidence for kernel quality assurance? How should it be measured?
• Explore ways to improve testing framework and tests in the kernel with a specific goal to increase traceability and code coverage.
• Regression Testing for safety: Prioritize configurations and tests critical and important for quality and dependability

Come and join us in the discussion on how we can assure that Linux becomes the most trusted and dependable software in the world!

We hope to see you there.

The annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) is a gathering of a relatively small subset of the developers working on the low-level (plumbing) details of Linux systems. It covers topics from below the kernel through the user-space components that underlie the interfaces and applications that most Linux users interact with. This year's event will be held virtually September 20‑24; it is shaping up to be another great edition of one of the premier open-registration Linux technical conferences on the calendar.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (drupal7), Fedora (linux-firmware), openSUSE (qemu), Oracle (kernel and thunderbird), Red Hat (thunderbird), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, kernel, and thunderbird), SUSE (dbus-1, libvirt, linuxptp, qemu, and slurm), and Ubuntu (aspell and mysql-5.7, mysql-8.0).

I recently learned that all that is required for someone to take out a loan in some random USA citizen's name is that citizen's full name, postal address, email address, date of birth, and social security number. If you are above a certain age, all of these are for all intents and purposes a matter of public record. If you are younger, then your social security number is of course supposed to be secret—and it will be, right up to that data breach that makes it available to all the wrong people.

This sort of thing can of course be a bit annoying to our involuntarily generous USA citizen. Some unknown person out there gets a fancy toy, and our citizen gets some bank's dunning notices. Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do, although I will not try to reproduce the entirety of the volumes of good advice that are available out there. Especially given that laws, processes, and procedures are all subject to change.

But at present, one important way to prevent this is to put a hold on your credit information through either of Experian, Equifax, or Transunion. I strongly suggest that you save yourself considerable time and hassle by doing this, which is free of charge for a no-questions-asked one-year hold. Taking this step is especially important if you are among the all too many of us whose finances don't have much slack, as was the case with my family back when my children were small. After all, it is one thing to have to deal with a few hassles in the form of phone calls, email, and paperwork, but it is quite another if you and your loved ones end up missing meals. Thankfully, it never came to that for my family, although one of my children did complain bitterly to a medical professional about the woefully insufficient stores of candy in our house.

Of course, I also have some advice for the vendor, retailer, digital-finance company, and bank that were involved in my case of attempted involuntary generosity:

1. Put just a little more effort into determining who you are really doing business with.
   
2. If the toy contains a computer and connects to the internet, consider the option of directing your dunning notices through the toy rather than to the email and phone of your involuntarily generous USA citizen.
   
3. A loan application for a toy that is shipped to a non-residential address should be viewed with great suspicion.
   
4. In fact, such a loan application should be viewed with with some suspicion even if the addresses match. Porch pirates and all that.
   
5. If the toy is of a type that must connect to the internet to do anything useful, you have an easy method of dealing with non-payment, don't you?
   

I should hasten to add that after only a little discussion, these companies have thus far proven quite cooperative in my particular case, which is why they are thus far going nameless.

Longer term, it is hard to be optimistic, especially given advances in various easy-to-abuse areas of information technology. In the meantime, I respectfully suggest that you learn from my experience and put a hold on your credit information!

Update: And after a number of phone calls and letters, it was agreed that I did not take out the loan and that I am not responsible for repaying it. Sometimes you get lucky. I nevertheless reiterate my recommendation of putting a hold on your credit information.

We are pleased to announce that the RISC-V Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. The RISC-V software eco-system is gaining momentum at breakneck speed with three new Linux development platforms available this year. The new platforms bring new issues to deal with.

Last year’s meetup achieved the following:

• glibc upstreaming for RV32
• RISC-V platform specification improvements
• EBBR support for RISC-V
• Progress towards merging KVM

This year’s topics to be discussed include:

• Platform specification progress, including SBI-0.3 and the future plans for SBI-0.4. There has been significant progress on the platform specifications, including a server profile, that needs discussion.
• Privileged specification progress, possible 1.12 (which is a work in progress at the foundation).
• Support for the V and B specifications, along with questions about the drafts. The V extension is of particular interest, as there are implementation of the draft extensions that are likely to be incompatible with what will eventually be ratified so we need to discuss what exactly user ABI compatibility means.
• H extension / KVM discussion, which is probably part of the drafts.  The KVM port has been hung up on the H extension ratification process, which is unlikely to proceed any time soon. We should discuss other options for a KVM port that avoid waiting for the H extension.
• Support for the batch of SOCs currently landing (JH7100, D1)
• Support for non-coherent systems
• How to handle compliance.

Come join us and participate in the discussion on how we can improve the support for RISC-V in the Linux kernel.

We hope to see you there.

One of the fundamental invariants of computing is that, regardless of how much memory is installed in a system, it is never enough. This is especially true of systems with tight performance constraints, where every page of memory is allocated and in use, making it difficult to find more when it is badly needed. One way to make more memory available is to kill one or more processes, freeing their resources for other users. But that often does not work as quickly or reliably as users would like. In an attempt to improve the situation, Suren Baghdasaryan has proposed the addition of a system call named process_mrelease().

Security updates have been issued by Debian (aspell, intel-microcode, krb5, rabbitmq-server, and ruby-actionpack-page-caching), Fedora (chromium, containernetworking-plugins, containers-common, crun, fossil, podman, skopeo, varnish-modules, and vmod-uuid), Gentoo (leptonica, libsdl2, and libyang), Mageia (golang, lib3mf, nodejs, python-pip, redis, and xstream), openSUSE (containerd, crmsh, curl, icinga2, and systemd), Oracle (containerd), and Red Hat (thunderbird).

The third 5.14 kernel prepatch is out for testing.

Here we are, a week later. After a relatively big rc2, things seem to have calmed down and rc3 looks pretty normal. Most of the fixes here are small, and the diffstat looks largely flat. And there's not an undue amount of stuff.