Hírolvasó

On the 20th anniversary of the open-sourcing of the OpenOffice.org suite, the LibreOffice project has sent an open letter to the Apache OpenOffice project suggesting that it is time for the latter to recognize that the game is over. "If Apache OpenOffice wants to still maintain its old 4.1 branch from 2014, sure, that’s important for legacy users. But the most responsible thing to do in 2020 is: help new users. Make them aware that there’s a much more modern, up-to-date, professionally supported suite, based on OpenOffice, with many extra features that people need."

Plausible, a web-analytics package that was reviewed here in June, has announced a move from the MIT license to the Affero GPL, version 3. "This change makes no difference to any of you who subscribe to Plausible Cloud or who self-host Plausible, but it may upset a few corporations who tried to use our software to directly compete with us without contributing back."

The Open Invention Network, which offers patent protection for a wide range of open-source software, has expanded its Linux System Definition — the set of software covered by the OIN patent non-aggression agreement. In particular, the new definition includes the exFAT filesystem (once the subject of a lot of patent worries), the KDE Frameworks, the Robot Operating System, and version 10 of the Android Open Source Project.

Version 5.20 of the Plasma KDE desktop is out. "A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general. Everyday utilities and tools, such as the Panels, Task Manager, Notifications and System Settings, have all been overhauled to make them more usable, efficient, and friendlier." There are also significant improvements in Plasma's Wayland support.

Todd Mortimer (mortimer@) has committed RETGUARD (see previous coverage) for the macppc (powerpc) and powerpc64 platforms:

CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: mortimer@cvs.openbsd.org 2020/10/12 08:52:09 Modified files: gnu/llvm/clang/lib/Driver/ToolChains: Clang.cpp gnu/llvm/llvm/lib/Target/PowerPC: CMakeLists.txt PPCAsmPrinter.cpp PPCFrameLowering.cpp PPCFrameLowering.h PPCInstrInfo.td gnu/usr.bin/clang/libLLVMPowerPCCodeGen: Makefile Added files: gnu/llvm/llvm/lib/Target/PowerPC: PPCReturnProtectorLowering.cpp PPCReturnProtectorLowering.h Log message: Add RETGUARD implementation for powerpc and powerpc64. ok deraadt@ kettenis@

See the Innovations page for the full list of platforms on which RETGUARD is implemented.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (eclipse-wtp, httpcomponents-client, rails, and spice), Fedora (crun, oniguruma, and podman), openSUSE (grafana, kdeconnect-kde, kernel, nextcloud, nodejs10, nodejs8, and permissions), Oracle (kernel), and SUSE (tigervnc).

Version 11.0.0 of the LLVM compiler suite is out. Significant change include the addition of a Fortran frontend and a lot more; see the collection of release-note sets in the announcement for details.

David Miller is the long-time maintainer of the kernel's networking subsystem. On October 10, he wrote this to his Twitter feed: "I had a stroke on Tuesday and have been recovering since please pray for me". We at LWN wish David a fast and complete recovery. (Thanks to Harald Welte for the heads-up).

Linus has released the 5.9 kernel. "Ok, so I'll be honest - I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn't really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It's just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for." Some of the significant features in this release are: x86 FSGSBASE support, capacity awareness in the deadline scheduler, the close_range() system call, proactive compaction in the memory-management subsystem, the rationalization of kernel-thread priorities, and more. See the KernelNewbies 5.9 page for more details.

Systems that manage large amounts of network traffic end up dedicating a significant part of their available CPU time to the network stack itself. Much of this work is done in software-interrupt context, which can be problematic in a number of ways. That may be about to change, though, once this patch series posted by Wei Wang is merged into the mainline.

Security updates have been issued by Oracle (bind, kernel, libcroco, nss and nspr, qemu-kvm, spice and spice-gtk, and squid) and SUSE (kernel).

One of the key rules of Linux kernel development is that the ABI between the kernel and user space cannot be broken; any change that breaks previously working programs will, outside of exceptional circumstances, be reverted. The rule seems clear, but there are ambiguities when it comes to determining just what constitutes the kernel ABI; tracepoints are a perennial example of this. A recent discussion has brought another one of those ambiguities to light: the on-disk format of Linux filesystems.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (activemq, golang-go.crypto, packagekit, and sympa), Fedora (php and xen), Red Hat (bind, kernel, and qemu-kvm), SUSE (qemu), and Ubuntu (golang-github-seccomp-libseccomp-golang and spice).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 8, 2020 is available.

In unusually stark terms, Mozilla is trying to rally the troops to take back the internet from the forces of evil—or at least "misinformation, corruption and greed"—that have overtaken it. In a September 30 blog post, the organization behind the Firefox web browser warned that "the internet needs our love". While there is lots to celebrate about the internet, it is increasingly under threat from various types of bad actors, so Mozilla is starting a campaign to try to push back against those threats.

The first preview of Ruby version 3.0 was released on September 25. It includes better support for type checking, additional language features, and two new experimental features: a parallel execution mechanism called Ractor, and Scheduler, which provides concurrency improvements.

Stable kernels 5.8.14, 5.4.70, and 4.19.150 have been released with some important fixes. Users should upgrade.

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (brotli, lib32-brotli, lib32-zeromq, samba, yaws, and zeromq), Debian (php7.0, puma, sane-backends, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Fedora (ghc-cmark-gfm, ghc-hakyll, gitit, pandoc, pandoc-citeproc, and patat), openSUSE (kdeconnect-kde and perl-DBI), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (chromium-browser and spice and spice-gtk), SUSE (hexchat and nodejs8), and Ubuntu (vino).