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[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for February 27, 2025

Linux Weekly News
6 hónap 2 hét óta
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

  • Front: Tail calls in CPython; BPF cancellation; Slabs, sheaves, and barns; Atomic block writes; Large filesystem block sizes; EPEL 10 for older CPUs; pytest-mh; Open-source battery.
  • Briefs: DMA discussion; Armbian 25.2; Gentoo qcow2; Aqualung 2.0; Emacs 30.1; Rust 1.85.0; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
corbet

[$] Building an open-source battery

Linux Weekly News
6 hónap 2 hét óta
FOSDEM 2025 featured the usual talks about open-source software, but, as always, the conference also offered the opportunity to discover some more exotic and less software-centric topics. That's how I learned about the Flow Battery Research Collective (FBRC), which is building what will eventually become an open-source home battery. Daniel Fernández Pinto represented the collective at FOSDEM with his talk "Building an Open-Source Battery for Stationary Storage" in the "Energy: Accelerating the Transition through Open Source" developer room (devroom).
jake

Gentoo now offers qcow2 disk images

Linux Weekly News
6 hónap 2 hét óta

The Gentoo Linux project has announced the availability of qcow2 images for amd64 (x86_64) and arm64 (aarch64), and plans to "eventually" offer images for the riscv64 and loongarch64 architectures.

The images, updated weekly, include an EFI boot partition and a fully functional Gentoo installation; either with no network activated but a password-less root login on the console ("no root pw"), or with network activated, all accounts initially locked, but cloud-init running on boot ("cloud-init").

jzb

Two new site features: full-text RSS and automatic dark mode

Linux Weekly News
6 hónap 2 hét óta
One of the often-requested LWN site features that has languished the longest on our to-do list is full-text RSS feeds. We are happy to announce that, finally, there is a set of such feeds available; the full set can be seen on our feeds page. This is a subscriber-only feature, and it works by creating a unique fetch URL for each user. We will, of course, be counting on our readers to not share those URLs.

Another feature we have had requests for is to automatically present the site in dark-mode colors when a reader's browser has been configured to prefer it. That feature, too, is now available. In this case, we had to think about the interaction between automatic selection and the color customization that the site has long had. The conclusion we reached is that, if custom colors have been configured for an account, they will win out over the automatic selection. There is a new preference in the customization area to change this default if desired.

Both of these features — and the other enhancements we have made recently — were enabled by the support of LWN's subscribers. By making it possible to bring in new staff last year, you created the space to improve the site experience while keeping up with the writing. We thank all of you for your support.

corbet

[$] Python interpreter adds tail calls

Linux Weekly News
6 hónap 2 hét óta

The Faster CPython project has been working to speed up the Python interpreter for the past several years. Now, Ken Jin, a member of the project, has merged a new set of changes that have been benchmarked as improving performance by 10% for some architectures. The only change is switching from using computed goto statements to using tail calls as part of the implementation of Python's bytecode interpreter — but that change allows modern compilers to generate significantly better code.

daroc

Security updates for Wednesday

Linux Weekly News
6 hónap 2 hét óta
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (crun, gnutls, libtasn1, and openssl), Mageia (emacs, gnutls, iniparser, kernel, kmod-virtualbox, kmod-xtables-addons, kernel-linus, krb5, libxml2, and vim), Slackware (tigervnc and xorg), SUSE (libprotobuf-lite28_3_0 and Maven), and Ubuntu (dropbear, kernel, libxml2, linux, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws-5.4 linux-raspi-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, linux-raspi, ProFTPD, python-virtualenv, rails, and xorg-server, xwayland).
jzb