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Security updates have been issued by Debian (linux-4.19, linux-latest-4.19, and openjdk-8) and Fedora (ark and hylafax+).

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 13, 2020 is available.

In this two-part series, we will be implementing a simple RSS reader for LWN using the UI toolkit Flutter. The project recently announced version 1.20 of the toolkit on August 5. Flutter is a BSD-licensed UI development platform written in Dart that is backed by Canonical as a new way to develop desktop applications targeting Linux. Part one will cover some of the basics of the project and Flutter, with part two building on that work to focus on building a full interactive UI for the application.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (dovecot and roundcube), Fedora (python36), Gentoo (chromium), openSUSE (ark, firefox, go1.13, java-11-openjdk, libX11, wireshark, and xen), Red Hat (bind and kernel), SUSE (libreoffice and python36), and Ubuntu (dovecot and software-properties).

The Linux kernel has never lacked for synchronization primitives and locking mechanisms, so one might justifiably wonder why there might be a need to add another one. The addition of local locks to 5.8 provides an answer to that question. These locks, which have their origin in the realtime (PREEMPT_RT) tree, were created to solve some realtime-specific problems, but they also bring some much-needed structure to a common locking pattern used in non-realtime kernels as well.

Mitchell Baker writes about changes at Mozilla, headlined by the laying-off of 250 people. "Recognizing that the old model where everything was free has consequences, means we must explore a range of different business opportunities and alternate value exchanges. How can we lead towards business models that honor and protect people while creating opportunities for our business to thrive? How can we, or others who want a better internet, or those who feel like a different balance should exist between social and public benefit and private profit offer an alternative?"

TechRadar reports that the popular password manager, 1Password, is coming to Linux. Currently available as a development preview, readers can check it out here. In a support forum post, 1Password founder David Teare said the release is "for testing and validation purposes only", with an official release expected later this year.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (firmware-nonfree, golang-github-seccomp-libseccomp-golang, and ruby-kramdown), Fedora (kernel, libmetalink, and nodejs), openSUSE (go1.13, perl-XML-Twig, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, libvncserver, and thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel-rt and python-paunch and openstack-tripleo-heat-templates), SUSE (dpdk, google-compute-engine, libX11, webkit2gtk3, xen, and xorg-x11-libX11), and Ubuntu (nss and samba).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 5.8.1, 5.7.15, 5.4.58, and 4.19.139 stable kernels. As usual, these contain lots of important fixes throughout the tree; users should upgrade.

Version 27.1 of the Emacs editor is out. New features include support for arbitrary-sized integers, HarfBuzz support, improved drawing with Cairo, and the obligatory new JSON parser.

Nick McKeown kicked off the virtual Netdev 0x14 conference with a talk on extending the programmability of networking equipment well beyond where it is today. His vision is of an end-to-end system with programmable pieces at every level. Getting there will require collaboration between the developers of the networking stacks on endpoint operating systems as well as those of switches, routers, and other backbone equipment. The keynote was held on July 28, a little over two weeks before the seven days of talks, workshops, and tutorials for Netdev, which begins on August 13.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (pillow, ruby-kramdown, wpa, and xrdp), Fedora (ark and rpki-client), Gentoo (apache, ark, global, gthumb, and iproute2), openSUSE (chromium, grub2, java-11-openjdk, libX11, and opera), Red Hat (bind, chromium-browser, java-1.7.1-ibm, java-1.8.0-ibm, and libvncserver), SUSE (LibVNCServer, perl-XML-Twig, thunderbird, and xen), and Ubuntu (samba).

For those who are wondering about the state of the proposed Perl 7 fork and the role of the newly formed Perl Steering Committee, Ricardo Signes has put together a detailed explanation that is worth a read. "You should not expect to see a stream of unjustified dictates issuing forth from some secret body on high. You should expect to see perl5-porters operating as it generally did: with proposals coming to the list, getting discussion, and then being thumbed up or down by the project manager. This is what has been happening for years, already. Some proposals were already discussed by the project manager and some were not. If you eliminated any named mailing list for doing this, it would still happen. The PSC is a means to say that there is a default group for such discussions. If you were wondering, its initial membership was formed from 'the people who came to or were invited to the Perl Core Summit' over the last few years."

As of this writing, just over 3,900 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.9 kernel development cycle. While this merge window has just begun, there is already a significant set of new features to point out.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that Geoffrey Knauth has been elected president, and free software activist and developer Odile Bénassy has been appointed to the board of directors. Knauth is replacing Richard Stallman who resigned last year. In Knauth's statement, he said: "The FSF board chose me at this moment as a servant leader to help the community focus on our shared dedication to protect and grow software that respects our freedoms. It is also important to protect and grow the diverse membership of the community."

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, libvncserver, postgresql-jdbc, and thunderbird), Debian (firejail and gupnp), Fedora (cutter-re, postgresql-jdbc, radare2, and webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (chromium, firefox, kernel, and python-rtslib-fb), Oracle (container-tools:ol8, kernel, and nss and nspr), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), and SUSE (firefox, kernel, postgresql10 and postgresql12, python-ipaddress, and xen).

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 5.7.14, 5.4.57, 4.19.138, and 4.14.193 stable kernels. As usual, these contain lots of important fixes throughout the tree; users should upgrade.

PHP 8.0 is on the horizon, and the project has imposed a feature freeze for the release. There's one exception to the feature freeze, though: the new attributes syntax. An attribute is syntactical metadata for PHP code, identical to what is called an "annotation" in other languages. Even though attributes have been voted on multiple times by the community, major contributor and creator of XDebug Derick Rethans threw a wrench into the works days before the feature freeze by challenging the current syntax. The ensuing discussion lead to the fourth attributes proposal for the year, with a special feature freeze exception being made by release manager Sara Golemon. This exception gives Rethans one more opportunity to convince the community to change how attributes work up to the Beta 3 release, scheduled for September 3.

Version 2.32 of the GNU C Library (glibc) has been released. It contains support for Unicode 13.0.0, a new Kurdish/Sorani locale (ckb_IQ), support for audit modules listed in ELF sections of the executable, support for Synopsys ARC HS cores, new signal abbreviation and descriptive text functions (sigabbrev_np() and sigdescr_np()), similar functions for errno values (strerrorname_np() and strerrordesc_np()), branch protection security hardening for arm64, and more. There are also lots of bug fixes, deprecations, and removals, as well as four security fixes. More information can be found in the release notes.