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[Kernel] Posted Mar 11, 2015 0:47 UTC (Wed) by corbet

As Michal Hocko noted at the beginning of his session at the 2015 Linux Storage, Filesystem, and Memory Management Summit, the news that the memory-management code will normally retry small allocations indefinitely rather than returning a failure status came as a surprise to many developers. In this session, the assembled group attempted to come up with ways to safely change this behavior. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report from LSFMM 2015.

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[Front] Posted Mar 5, 2015 17:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet

When Karen Sandler, the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, spoke recently at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, she spent some time on the Linux Compliance Project, an effort to improve compliance with the Linux kernel's licensing rules. This project, launched with some fanfare in 2012, has been relatively quiet ever since. Karen neglected to mention that this situation was about to change; that had to wait for the announcement on March 5 of the filing of a lawsuit against VMware alleging copyright infringement for its use of kernel code.

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[Distributions] Posted Mar 4, 2015 18:24 UTC (Wed) by corbet

Thus far, this series on network-attached storage (NAS) distributions has looked at three different approaches to the problem. OpenMediaVault provides a NAS server using traditional Linux filesystems, Rockstor bases everything on the Btrfs filesystem, and FreeNAS is a FreeBSD-based system using ZFS. This fourth (and probably final) installment in this series goes back to Btrfs with a look at EasyNAS, which is another attempt to make the unique features of Btrfs available in a dedicated NAS distribution.

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[Front] Posted Feb 25, 2015 23:56 UTC (Wed) by n8willis

The newest update to the Krita digital painting application has been released. Version 2.9 introduces several new user-interface features, updates to the layers system, and a variety of tool and rendering improvements. The 2.9 development cycle was also the project's first to be centered around a crowdfunding campaign.

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[Development] Posted Feb 24, 2015 18:17 UTC (Tue) by corbet

A traditional feature of the tools track at the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit is an update from the developers of the GNU C Library (glibc); that tradition was upheld in fine form at the 2015 event. Glibc developer Roland McGrath noted that while the project is a critical component in vast numbers of Linux installations, it does not have a lot of developers working on it. Still, even with a relatively small developer base, some real progress has been made over the last year.

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[Front] Posted Feb 13, 2015 23:07 UTC (Fri) by corbet

When one thinks about the PHP language, terms like "strong typing" and "strict checking" do not normally come to mind. But, as the project works toward its next major release (to be called PHP 7), it has become embroiled in a fierce debate over the proposed addition of some simple typing features to the language. To some, PHP is growing up into a safer, better-defined language, while others see the changes as possibly destroying the character of a historically freewheeling language.

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[Front] Posted Feb 11, 2015 21:38 UTC (Wed) by n8willis

The free-software community has frequently advocated the development of new decentralized, federated network services—for example, promoting XMPP as an alternative to AOL Instant Messenger, StatusNet as an alternative to Twitter, or Diaspora as an alternative to Facebook. The recently launched Matrix project takes on a different service: IRC-like multi-user chat.

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[Front] Posted Feb 4, 2015 19:20 UTC (Wed) by n8willis

The Inkscape project released version 0.91 at the end of January, a release culminating more than four years of development. The new release incorporates a lengthy list of improvements from that time period: new tools, performance enhancements, and fixes to several longstanding bugs. Just as importantly, though, it also lays the groundwork for a 1.0 release that will signify an important milestone: full SVG 1.1 support. Over the years, though, Inkscape has evolved to be more than just an SVG editor—as version 0.91 demonstrates.

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[Distributions] Posted Feb 3, 2015 22:34 UTC (Tue) by corbet

Thus far, this series has looked at Linux distributions that are optimized for network-attached storage (NAS) deployments. This installment will take a slightly different turn: the system under review (FreeNAS) is indeed a free distribution for NAS applications, but it is based on FreeBSD rather than Linux. In many ways it looks like the Linux-based systems reviewed previously, but there are some interesting differences.

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[Front] Posted Jan 28, 2015 22:16 UTC (Wed) by n8willis

At linux.conf.au 2015 in Auckland, Rusty Russell presented a talk about his personal side-project, Pettycoin. Russell had announced Pettycoin at LCA 2014; at that time it represented an untested concept: a way to attach a separate, Bitcoin-like network to the existing Bitcoin blockchain. Pettycoin's goal was originally to offer a simpler and faster "side network" that periodically reconnected to Bitcoin. In the intervening year, Russell made a lot of progress, but other new innovations in the Bitcoin arena have led him to question parts of the Pettycoin approach and consider a reimplementation.

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[Security] Posted Mar 10, 2015 21:21 UTC (Tue) by ris

The Project Zero blog looks at the "Rowhammer" bug. "“Rowhammer” is a problem with some recent DRAM devices in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows. We tested a selection of laptops and found that a subset of them exhibited the problem. We built two working privilege escalation exploits that use this effect. One exploit uses rowhammer-induced bit flips to gain kernel privileges on x86-64 Linux when run as an unprivileged userland process. When run on a machine vulnerable to the rowhammer problem, the process was able to induce bit flips in page table entries (PTEs). It was able to use this to gain write access to its own page table, and hence gain read-write access to all of physical memory." (Thanks to Paul Wise)

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[Announcements] Posted Mar 10, 2015 20:04 UTC (Tue) by ris

VMware has published a statement on the lawsuit filed by Christoph Hellwig alleging copyright infringement. "On March 5, 2015, Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) announced a lawsuit in Germany, filed by Christoph Hellwig against VMware, alleging a failure to comply with the General Public License (GPL). We believe the lawsuit is without merit, and we are disappointed that the SFC and plaintiff have resorted to litigation given the considerable efforts we have made to understand and address their concerns. We see huge value in supporting multiple development methodologies, including free and open source software, and we appreciate the crucial role of free and open source software in the data center. In particular, VMware devotes significant effort supporting customer usage of Linux and F/OSS based software stacks and workloads." LWN recently covered the lawsuit. (Thanks to Emmanuel Seyman)

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[Distributions] Posted Mar 10, 2015 19:12 UTC (Tue) by ris

The Fedora Project has announced the release of Fedora 22 Alpha. "The Alpha release contains all the exciting features of Fedora 22's editions in a form that anyone can help test. This testing, guided by the Fedora QA team, helps us target and identify bugs. When these bugs are fixed, we make a Beta release available. A Beta release is code-complete and bears a very strong resemblance to the third and final release. The final release of Fedora 22 is expected in May."

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[Security] Posted Mar 10, 2015 17:19 UTC (Tue) by ris

Mandriva has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

Oracle has updated 389-ds-base (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities), glibc (OL7: multiple vulnerabilities), hivex (OL7: privilege escalation), openssh (OL7: two vulnerabilities), and pcre (OL7: information leak).

Red Hat has updated qpid-cpp (RHE MRG for RHEL7; RHE MRG for RHEL6; RHE MRG for RHEL5: multiple vulnerabilities).

Scientific Linux has updated 389-ds-base (SL6: information disclosure).

Ubuntu has updated apache2 (multiple vulnerabilities), oxide-qt (14.10, 14.04: multiple vulnerabilities), and firefox (14.10, 14.04, 12.04: regression in previous update).

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[Kernel] Posted Mar 9, 2015 17:41 UTC (Mon) by corbet

A brief "code of conflict" was merged into the kernel's documentation directory for the 4.0-rc3 release. The idea is to describe the parameters for acceptable discourse without laying down a lot of rules; it also names the Linux Foundation's technical advisory board as a body to turn to in case of unacceptable behavior. This document has been explicitly acknowledged by a large number of prominent kernel developers.

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[Security] Posted Mar 9, 2015 17:06 UTC (Mon) by ris

Debian-LTS has updated konversation (information disclosure), libarchive (directory traversal), and redcloth (cross-site scripting).

Fedora has updated cabextract (F21; F20: privilege escalation), kernel (F21: denial of service), krb5 (F20: multiple vulnerabilities), lftp (F20: automatically accepting ssh keys), libpng10 (F21; F20: two vulnerabilities), and qt3 (F21; F20: denial of service).

Gentoo has updated dbus (denial of service), freetype (multiple vulnerabilities), glibc (multiple vulnerabilities), and php (multiple vulnerabilities).

Mageia has updated apache (denial of service), jython (code execution), librsvg (multiple vulnerabilities), mapserver (command execution), and putty, filezilla (information disclosure).

Mandriva has updated rpm (code execution).

openSUSE has updated libmspack (13.2, 13.1: denial of service), thunderbird (13.2, 13.1: multiple vulnerabilities), and tiff (13.2, 13.1: multiple vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated firefox (SLE11 SP3; SLE11 SP2,SP1, SLES10 SP4: multiple vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated icu (12.04: regression in previous update).

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[Kernel] Posted Mar 9, 2015 13:17 UTC (Mon) by corbet

The 4.0-rc3 prepatch is out. "Back on track with a Sunday afternoon release schedule, since there was nothing particularly odd going on this week, and no last-minute bugs that I knew of and wanted to get fixed holding things up."

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[Distributions] Posted Mar 9, 2015 13:10 UTC (Mon) by corbet

Debian project leader Lucas Nussbaum has confirmed the appointment of three new members to the Debian technical committee. The new members are Didier Raboud, Tollef Fog Heen, and Sam Hartman; they will be replacing Ian Jackson, Russ Allbery, and Colin Watson.

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[Kernel] Posted Mar 8, 2015 15:19 UTC (Sun) by corbet

The 3.19.1, 3.18.9, 3.14.35, and 3.10.71 stable kernel updates are available; each contains a relatively large set of important fixes.

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[Development] Posted Mar 6, 2015 21:30 UTC (Fri) by n8willis

At his blog, David Edmundson writes about the state of high-DPI support in KDE. "For some applications supporting high DPI has been easy. It is a single one line in KWrite, and suddenly all icons look spot on with no regressions. For applications such as Dolphin which do a lot more graphical tasks, this has not been so trivial. There are a lot of images involved, and a lot of complicated code around caching these which conflicts with the high resolution support without some further work." He is personally tracking the progress of many applications, but notes that there are many unsolved issues. "There are still many applications without a frameworks release even in the upcoming 15.04 applications release. Even in the next applications release in 15.08 August we are still unlikely to see a released PIM stack. Is it a good idea to add an option into our UIs that improves some applications at the cost of consistency? It's not an easy answer." This update is Edmunsdon's second post on the subject; the first, from November 2014, is also quite informative.

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