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Owners of Android handsets can be forgiven for feeling frustration over how long it took to get an update from the 2.3 "gingerbread" release. Google's flat-out effort to improve tablet support led to a 3.0 ("honeycomb") release that was not deemed suitable for handset use—or for open-source release. It was only with the 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" cycle that all that new code became available for handsets—sort of. Six months after the 4.0 release, your editor finally got his hands on a device that can run it; what follows is a review of sorts.

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The PostgreSQL project has just released a beta of its next major version, 9.2. As usual with its annual release, this version includes many new features, most of which are targeted at improving database performance. The developers have been hard at work improving response times, increasing multicore scalability, and providing for more efficient queries on large data. They also found time to include some other major features, so let's explore a few of the things 9.2 beta has to offer.

Guest author Josh Berkus does just that in the full article from this week's edition.

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Bcache is a mechanism for using a solid-state drive as a fast cache for one or more slower drives. LWN last looked at bcache almost two years ago. Since then, the project has been relatively quiet, but development has continued. Click below (subscribers only) for an update on bcache from this week's Kernel Page.

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Attentive long-time readers of LWN may remember that this business is based entirely on free software with one distressing exception: our business accounting is still done using the proprietary "QuickBooks Pro" package. QuickBooks does not lack for aggravations, but the task of replacing it has never quite attained a high enough priority for something to actually happen. Good replacements in the free software community are hard to come by, accounting is boring, our accountant deals easily (and cheaply) with QuickBooks files, and the existing solution, for the most part, simply works. Or, at least, it used to simply work.

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LWN is pleased to post the first article from our latest guest author: Dave Phillips. Dave writes: "My jet lag is gone, I've finally come back to ground, and at last I can start to sort out my experiences at the 10th annual Linux Audio Conference, held this year at CCRMA, the Center For Computer Research In Music And Acoustics at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California USA. It was the first time the event had been held in the States, and the organizers obviously intended to make a good impression. I'll cut to the spoiler right now to let you know that they succeeded, with honors." Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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One of the few hard rules of kernel development is that breaking the user-space binary interface is not acceptable. If there is user-space code that depends on specific behavior, that behavior must be maintained regardless of how inconvenient that may be. But what is to be done if two different programs depend on mutually-incompatible behaviors, so that it is seemingly impossible to keep them both working? The answer may be to violate another rule by putting an ugly hack into the kernel—or to do something rather more tricky.

Click below (subscribers only) for the full article from this week's Kernel Page.

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Concurrency tends to make programming hard. Kernel development obviously involves dealing with a lot of concurrency, but there is also a lot of multi-threaded user-space development that suffers from the same issues. It would be nice if the computer could help developers avoid race conditions and other problems that arise in concurrent environments. Some developers at Google have been working on just such a project for some time, but they have just relocated the project from GCC to the LLVM Clang compiler, saying that GCC is not suited to the work they want to do. The result has been a sort of wake-up call for GCC developers. Is the GCC compiler suite not well suited to the creation of static analysis tools?

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The core library that sits between user space and the kernel, the GNU C library (or GLIBC), has undergone some changes recently in its governance, at least partly to make it a more inclusive project. On the last day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Carlos O'Donell gave an update on the project, the way it will be governed moving forward, and its plans for the future. GLIBC founder Roland McGrath was on hand to contribute his thoughts as well. Click below (subscribers only) for the full report.

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Messages from the kernel are created by humans, usually using one of the many variants of the printk() function. But, increasingly, those messages are read by machines in the form of log file parsers, automated management systems, and so on. The machines have, for some time, struggled to make sense out of those human-created messages which, often as not, are unpredictable in their organization, lacking important information, and subject to change. So it is not surprising that there has been ongoing interest in adding some structure to kernel log messages; the subject was recently raised by the audience at the Collaboration Summit kernel panel. At about the same time, a new attempt to improve kernel logging was posted to the linux-kernel mailing list; click below (subscribers only) for a report from next week's Kernel Page.

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Keith Packard has been working on the X window system since the early days, but more recently has been doing lots of work to enable its replacement. X has long held the position as the way that graphics is done on Linux (and other Unix) systems, but that is changing. He came to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which was held April 3-5 in San Francisco, to talk about the Wayland protocol and the Weston server, and how they could interoperate with X. Wayland looks to be an interesting change for desktop graphics on Linux.

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Current news

Gentoo has updated chromium (multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated ffmpeg (ES5.0; 2010.1; 2011.0: multiple vulnerabilities).

openSUSE has updated gnutls (denial of service) and coreutils (command injection).

Ubuntu has updated quagga (multiple vulnerabilities).

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Version 0.9 of the Kdenlive video editor has been released. Improvements in this release include the ability to align multiple video tracks using the audio stream, a rewritten effects subsystem, improved importing of online media, and a number of usability enhancements.

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The OrientDB "NoSQL graph-document database management system" project has produced its 1.0 release. New features include a new multi-master replication scheme, a new object database interface, an undo mechanism, server-side scripting, and more.

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Debian has updated wordpress (multiple vulnerabilities), ffmpeg (multiple vulnerabilities), and icedove, iceweasel (fixes a regression in previous update).

Fedora has updated F16: kernel (unfiltered netdev rio_ioctl access by users) and F16: postgresql-pgpoolAdmin (multiple vulnerabilities).

openSUSE has updated chromium (multiple vulnerabilities), taglib (denial of service), mysql-cluster (multiple unspecified vulnerabilities), mysql-community-server (multiple unspecified vulnerabilities), and mariadb (multiple unspecified vulnerabilities).

SUSE has updated kernel (multiple vulnerabilities).

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Linus has sent out the 3.4-rc7 prepatch, saying: "This is almost certainly the last -rc in this series - things really have calmed down, and I even considered just cutting 3.4 this weekend, but felt that another week wouldn't hurt." Expect a 3.4 final release in the near future.

Meanwhile, on the stable front, 3.3.6 is out with another set of important fixes.

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Ben Hutchings has announced the release of the 3.2.17 stable kernel. It has lots of fixes throughout the tree (160+ patches).

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The H has a story about the launch of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). "The mission of the non-profit organisation is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development." Spearheading the OSRF is Willow Garage, whose Robot Operating System (ROS) we covered in January 2012.

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Dan Goodin at Ars Technica reports on iSec Partners, a company proposing to make .secure into a heavily-vetted high security domain. "Sites that wanted to be a part of this exclusive domain would have to undergo rigorous screening to verify their identity. Physical addresses, trademark registrations, articles of incorporation, and other legal documents would be reviewed by human beings. Upon approval, applicants would receive two-factor authentication hardware to register online. They would also be required to meet a minimum set of security practices, including end-to-end encryption of virtually all Web and e-mail traffic."

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openSUSE has updated opera (multiple vulnerabilities).

Fedora has updated wordpress (F15 and F16: multiple vulnerabilities).

Mandriva has updated openssl (denial of service).

Red Hat has updated php (code execution).

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IT World Canada is reporting that a team from IBM and SAP is working to bring support for PowerPC processors to OpenJDK, on Linux and on IBM's AIX. "'This reference implementation can then be used by IBM and SAP to provide their commercially licensed Java offerings in much the same way in which Oracle offers its Oracle JDK product based on OpenJDK,' [Volker] Simonis said. 'The big advantage for the open source community is that everybody (i.e. Linux distributors like Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu) will be able to build and provide free and state-of-the-art versions of Java based on the new OpenJDK platform ports. And of course they are highly welcome to engage in the project as well.'" OpenJDK would replace IBM's proprietary JDK as the leading Java implementation on PowerPC. The project was first proposed May 7 on the OpenJDK discussion list.

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