Hírolvasó

Kernel prepatch 6.15-rc1

5 hónap 1 hét óta
Linus has released 6.15-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release. "As expected, this was one of the bigger merge windows, almost certainly just because we had some pent-up development due to the previous releases being impacted by the holiday season. That said, while it's bigger than normal, it's not some kind of record-breaking thing.". In the end, 12.633 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline during this merge window.
corbet

[$] The state of guest_memfd

5 hónap 1 hét óta
A typical cloud-computing host will share some of its memory with each guest that it runs. The host retains its access to that memory, though, meaning that it can readily dig through that memory in search of data that the guest would prefer to keep private. The guest_memfd subsystem removes (most of) the host's access to guest memory, making the guest's data more secure. In the memory-management track of the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, David Hildenbrand ran a discussion on the state and future of this feature.
corbet

[$] The future of ZONE_DEVICE

5 hónap 1 hét óta
Alistair Popple started his session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit by proclaiming that ZONE_DEVICE is "the ugly stepchild" of the kernel's memory-management subsystem. Ugly or not, the ability to manage memory that is attached to a peripheral device rather than a CPU is increasingly important on current hardware. Popple hoped to cover some of the challenges with ZONE_DEVICE and find ways to make the stepchild a bit more attractive, if not bring it into the family entirely.
corbet

[$] Supporting untorn buffered writes

5 hónap 1 hét óta
At last year's Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF), there was a discussion about atomic writes that was accompanied by patches to support the feature in the block layer, and for direct I/O on XFS. That work was merged, but another piece of that discussion concerned adding the feature for buffered I/O, in part because the PostgreSQL database currently has to jump through hoops to ensure that its writes are not "torn" (partially written) when there is an error or crash. Luis Chamberlain led a combined storage and filesystem track at this year's summit to revisit the idea of providing atomic (or untorn) writes for buffered I/O.
jake

[$] A strange BPF error message

5 hónap 1 hét óta

Yonghong Song brought a story about tracking down the cause of a strange verifier error message to the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. He then presented some possible ways to improve Clang's user experience for anyone running into the same class of error in the future. Toward the end of his allotted time, he also discussed the problems with optimizations that change the signature of functions — a problem that José Marchesi had also brought up in the previous session.

daroc

Security updates for Friday

5 hónap 1 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox), Debian (atop and thunderbird), Fedora (webkitgtk), Mageia (microcode), Oracle (expat), SUSE (apparmor, assimp-devel, aws-efs-utils, expat, firefox, ghostscript, go1.23, gotosocial, govulncheck-vulndb, GraphicsMagick, headscale, libmozjs-128-0, libsaml-devel, openvpn, perl-Data-Entropy, and xz), and Ubuntu (gnupg2, kernel, linux-azure-fips, linux-iot, openvpn, ruby-saml, and xz-utils).
daroc

[$] Page allocation for address-space isolation

5 hónap 2 hét óta
Address-space isolation may well be, as Brendan Jackman said at the beginning of his memory-management-track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, "some security bullshit". But it also holds the potential to protect the kernel from a wide range of vulnerabilities, both known and unknown, while reducing the impact of existing mitigations. Implementing address-space isolation with reasonable performance, though, is going to require some significant changes. Jackman was there to get feedback from the memory-management community on how those changes should be implemented.
corbet