Hírolvasó

In a set of commits to the tree on Saturday, Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) added the early beginnings of support for the 64-bit PowerPC platform:

Date: Sat, 16 May 2020 11:11:14 -0600 (MDT) From: Mark Kettenis <kettenis@openbsd.org> To: source-changes@openbsd.org Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: kettenis@cvs.openbsd.org 2020/05/16 11:11:14 Added files: sys/arch/powerpc64/compile: Makefile Makefile.inc sys/arch/powerpc64/compile/GENERIC: Makefile sys/arch/powerpc64/conf: GENERIC Makefile.powerpc64 files.powerpc64 ld.script sys/arch/powerpc64/include: _types.h atomic.h bus.h cdefs.h conf.h cpu.h db_machdep.h disklabel.h endian.h exec.h fpu.h frame.h intr.h limits.h mutex.h param.h pcb.h pmap.h proc.h psl.h ptrace.h reg.h signal.h softintr.h spinlock.h tcb.h vmparam.h sys/arch/powerpc64/powerpc64: autoconf.c conf.c cpu.c disksubr.c genassym.cf locore.S locore0.S machdep.c pmap.c process_machdep.c softintr.c sys_machdep.c syscall.c vm_machdep.c Log message: Planting the first seed for OpenBSD/powerpc64.

As support for additional hardware platforms brings opportunities to find (and fix) bugs on other, more established environments, this is definitely an interesting development. Of course it is still currently very much in its infancy, so don't drag out your POWER9 systems just yet, unless you're ready to roll up your sleeves and get some diffs submitted. Thanks to Mark for working on this port!

Over the years, the kernel's CPU scheduler has become increasingly aware of how much load every task is putting on the system; this information is used to make smarter task placement decisions. Sometimes, though, this logic can go wrong, leading to a situation that Valentin Schneider describes as "utilization inversion". At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), he described the problem and some approaches that are being considered to address it.

Linux is not heavily used in safety-critical systems — yet. There is an increasing level of interest in such deployments, though, and that is driving a number of initiatives to determine how Linux can be made suitable for safety-critical environments. At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), Michal Sojka shone a light on one corner of this work: testing the thermal characteristics of Linux systems with an eye toward deployment in avionics systems.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (apt, inetutils, and log4net), Fedora (kernel, mailman, and viewvc), Gentoo (chromium, freerdp, libmicrodns, live, openslp, python, vlc, and xen), Oracle (.NET Core, container-tools:1.0, and kernel), Red Hat (kernel-rt), Scientific Linux (kernel), SUSE (kernel, libvirt, python-PyYAML, and syslog-ng), and Ubuntu (json-c).

It seems that the Rust programming language has only been around for five years. "With all that's going on in the world you'd be forgiven for forgetting that as of today, it has been five years since we released 1.0 in 2015! Rust has changed a lot these past five years, so we wanted reflect back on all of our contributors' work since the stabilization of the language."

Libre Graphics World is running an extensive interview with several Inkscape developers. "I'd say we're at the point of supporting SVG as much as possible, but we've mostly given up trying to add editing features to the SVG specification. As the W3C is dominated by web browsers who don't need multi page or connectors. I dare not say much more about W3C-specific things. I know that I'm personally disappointed that Inkscape's considerable importance in the SVG creation space does not lend itself to getting the feature we intend to build into Inkscape into the actual SVG specification. This does lead to the problem that going forwards we're likely to have browser incompatibilities."

Life gets complicated for the kernel when there is nothing for the system to do. The obvious response is to put the CPU into an idle state to save power, but which one? CPUs offer a wide range of sleep states with different power-usage and latency characteristics. Picking too shallow a state will waste energy, while going too deep hurts latency and can impact the performance of the system as a whole. The timer-events-oriented (TEO) cpuidle governor is a relatively new attempt to improve the kernel's choice of sleep states; at the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, Pratik Sampat presented a variant of the TEO governor that tries to improve its choices further.

The 5.6.13, 5.4.41, and 4.19.123 stable kernels have been released. They contain important fixes throughout the kernel tree; users should upgrade.

After our article on TLS 1.3 server support in LibreSSL, we have decided to upgrade the machine running the undeadly website to newer LibreSSL.

Since earlier today the site supports TLS 1.3. Undeadly still gets an A+ on Qualys' SSL Labs.

Security updates have been issued by Debian (apt and libreswan), Fedora (glpi, grafana, java-latest-openjdk, mailman, and oddjob), Oracle (container-tools:2.0, container-tools:ol8, kernel, libreswan, squid:4, and thunderbird), SUSE (apache2, grafana, and python-paramiko), and Ubuntu (apt and libexif).

In a post to the ports@ mailing list, Landry Breuil (landry@) shared some of his notes on using qemu guest agent on OpenBSD kvm/qemu guests. He made a few enhancements for Undeadly:

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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 14, 2020 is available.

A project that has been floating around in the Python world for a number of years is now working its way toward inclusion into the language—or not. "Subinterpreters", which are separate Python interpreters that can currently be created via the C API for extensions, are seen by some as a way to get a more Go-like concurrency model for Python. The first step toward that goal is to expose that API in the standard library. But there are questions about whether subinterpreters are actually a desirable feature for Python at all, as well as whether the hoped-for concurrency improvements will materialize.

Core scheduling is a proposed modification to the kernel's CPU scheduler that allows system administrators to control which processes can be running simultaneously on the same processor core. It was originally proposed as a security mechanism, but other use cases have shown up over time as well. At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), a group of some 50 developers gathered online to discuss the current state of the core-scheduling patches and what is needed to get them into the mainline kernel.

Security updates have been issued by Fedora (java-1.8.0-openjdk and seamonkey), Gentoo (firefox, lrzip, qemu, squid, and thunderbird), Oracle (thunderbird), Red Hat (buildah, kernel, kernel-alt, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, podman, python-pip, python-virtualenv, and qemu-kvm), Scientific Linux (kernel), Slackware (mariadb), SUSE (openconnect), and Ubuntu (file, firefox, iproute2, pulseaudio, and squid, squid3).