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It's hard to say why, but May appears to be the month where we look in on PyPy. Three years ago, we had a May 2010 introduction to PyPy, followed by an experiment using it in May 2011. This year, the PyPy 2.0 release was made on May 9—that, coupled with our evident tradition, makes for a good reason to look in on this Python interpreter written in Python. Subscribers can click below for our report on the release from this week's edition.

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In Berkeley, California — the birthplace of PostgreSQL — it's spring: plum and cherry blossoms, courting finches and college students, new plans for the summer, and the first beta release of the database system. Every year, the first beta of the next PostgreSQL version comes out in April or May, for a final release in September. PostgreSQL 9.3 beta 1 was released to the public on May 13th, and contains a couple dozen new features both for database administrators and application developers. Subscribers can click below for a look at some of the new features by guest author Josh Berkus.

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On a typical Linux system, each running CPU will be diverted between 100 and 1000 times each second by the periodic timer interrupt. That interrupt is the CPU's cue to reconsider which process should be running, catch up with read-copy-update (RCU) callbacks, and generally handle any necessary housekeeping. This periodic "tick" can be reasonably compared to the infamous big kernel lock (BKL): it is convenient to have around, but it also has an effect on performance that makes developers wish to abolish it. The key difference might be that getting rid of the timer tick has taken rather longer than was required to eliminate the BKL. The 3.10 kernel will take an important step in that direction, though, with the addition of the "full NOHZ" mode — but a lot of limitations still apply.

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The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (LFCS) seems to be a likely venue for an update on the status of building the kernel with Clang/LLVM. Both in 2011 and 2012, we covered those updates. LFCS 2013 continued the trend as LLVMLinux project lead Behan Webster presented the status and plans for the project at LFCS. The gathering lived up to its name as well, since two problems faced by the project were solved through collaboration at the summit.

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Since the advent of object-oriented programming languages around the time of Smalltalk in the 1970s, inheritance has been a mainstay of the object-oriented vision. It is therefore a little surprising that both "Go" and "Rust" — two relatively new languages which support object-oriented programming — manage to avoid mentioning it. In this subscriber-only article, Neil Brown looks at how this classic object-oriented concept has evolved in two recent languages.

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As open source becomes more popular and mature, questions of formalizing the governance and corporate structures of projects are becoming of increasing importance, as can been seen by the rising visibility of various FOSS foundations. At the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, Tony Sebro shared his insights about the value that fiscal sponsors bring as umbrella organizations for FOSS projects. Sebro is the General Counsel of Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the home of about 30 free and open source projects, including Samba, Git, and BusyBox.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full report by Martin Michlmayr.

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The 2013 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit was held April 18 and 19 in San Francisco, California, immediately after the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. The first set of notes from that gathering is now available; at this point, we have most of the plenary sessions and the entire memory management track written up. The rest of our notes from the Summit will be added in the near future.

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Since the demise of core memory, there has been a fundamental dichotomy in data storage technology: memory is either fast and ephemeral, or slow and persistent. The situation is changing, though, and that leads to some interesting challenges for the Linux kernel. How will we adapt to the coming world where nonvolatile memory (NVM) devices are commonplace? Ric Wheeler led a session at the 2013 Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to discuss this issue.

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Rust, the new programming language being developed by the Mozilla project, has a number of interesting features. One that stands out is the focus on safety. There are clear attempts to increase the range of errors that the compiler can detect and prevent, and thereby reduce the number of errors that end up in production code.

Click below (subscribers only) for an overview of the Rust language by LWN contributor Neil Brown.

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Given Eben Moglen's long association with the Free Software Foundation, his work on drafting the GPLv3, and his role as President and Executive Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, his talk at the 2013 Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop promised to be thought-provoking. He chose to focus on two topics that he saw as particularly relevant for the free software ecosystem within the next five years: patents and the decline of copyleft licenses.

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Current news

Version 1.5.0 of the QEMU hardware emulator is out. "This release was developed in a little more than 90 days by over 130 unique authors averaging 20 commits a day. This represents a year-to-year growth of over 38 percent making it the most active release in QEMU history." Some of the new features include KVM-on-ARM support, a native GTK+ user interface, and lots of hardware support and performance improvements. See the change log for lots of details.

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Fedora has updated tomcat (F18; F17: information disclosure) and krb5 (F18: UDP ping-pong flaw in kpasswd).

openSUSE has updated tiff (12.2; 12.1: buffer overflows) and clamav (12.2; 12.1: multiple vulnerabilities).

Red Hat has updated kernel-rt (multiple vulnerabilities) and kernel (RHEL 6.2 EUS; RHEL 6.1 EUS: privilege escalation).

Slackware has updated kernel (privilege escalation).

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A new kernel tracing tool called "ktap" has made its first release. "KTAP have different design principles from Linux mainstream dynamic tracing language in that it's based on bytecode, so it doesn't depend upon GCC, doesn't require compiling a kernel module, safe to use in production environment, fulfilling the embedded ecosystem's tracing needs." It's in an early state; the project is looking for testers and contributors.

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The second 3.10 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "For being an -rc2, it's not unreasonably sized, but I did take a few pulls that I wouldn't have taken later in the rc series. So it's not exactly small either. We've got arch updates (PPC, MIPS, PA-RISC), we've got driver fixes (net, gpu, target, xen), and we've got filesystem updates (btrfs, ext4 and cepth - rbd)."

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Fedora has updated mediawiki (F18; F17: multiple vulnerabilities) and libtiff (F17: buffer overflows).

Mageia has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities), kernel-linus (multiple vulnerabilities), kernel-tmb (multiple vulnerabilities), kernel-rt (multiple vulnerabilities), and kernel-vserver (multiple vulnerabilities).

openSUSE has updated telepathy-idle (certificate validation error) and gnutls (plaintext recovery).

SUSE has updated acroread (multiple vulnerabilities), and oracle-update (SM 1.7; SM 1.2: multiple vulnerabilities).

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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 3.9.3, 3.4.46, and 3.0.79 stable kernels. As always, they contain important fixes throughout the tree, so users should upgrade.

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The NetBSD Project has announced NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. "It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements." See the changelog for details.

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The much-delayed Mageia 3 release is out. "We dedicate this release to the memory of Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration to those he left behind. We miss his brilliance, his courtesy and his dedication." Changes include an RPM upgrade, the 3.8 kernel, availability of GRUB2 (but GRUB is still the default bootloader), and more. See the release notes for lots of details.

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The Perl 5.18.0 release is out. "Perl v5.18.0 represents approximately 12 months of development since Perl v5.16.0 and contains approximately 400,000 lines of changes across 2,100 files from 113 authors." See this perldelta page for details on what has changed.

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Sony has announced the availability of an Android Open Source Project distribution for its Xperia Tablet Z device. "For all you developers out there, of course this means you can now access the software and contribute to this project. And this is all before the tablet is even available in the US. A special thanks to our Sony Mobile team for helping us create the package early and a huge thanks to the Android developer community for all your support. We can’t wait to see what you’ll do with the code." Source is available on GitHub.

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