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As the Linux desktop increases in popularity, the user interface experience has become increasingly important. For example, most laptops today have multitouch capabilities that have yet to be fully exposed and exploited in the free software ecosystem. Soon we will be carrying around multitouch tablets with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation. In order to provide a high-quality and rich experience we must fully exploit multitouch gestures. The uTouch stack developed by Canonical aims to provide a foundation for gestures on the Linux desktop.

Click below (subscribers only) for an overview of the architecture of uTouch contributed by uTouch hacker Chase Douglas.

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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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Current news

Wired is impressed with the Linux-powered in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system in the most recent Cadillac XTS. "While the XTS’ spate of processors and controllers isn’t running the open source offspring of Linus Torvalds, the game-changing infotainment intender known as the Cadillac User Experience (CUE) is. [...] Buried deep within the dash is a three-core ARM 11 processor, powering two displays: one eight-inch capacitive touch screen — the first non-resistive display to come to a production car — and a second, 12.3-inch fully configurable instrument cluster mounted behind the steering wheel. Two of those cores adapt on the fly to handle voice commands powered by the same Nuance technology used by many automakers, along with Apple’s personal assistant, Siri. But with CUE, everything is processed on board."

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Debian has updated request-tracker3.8 (multiple vulnerabilities).

openSUSE has updated cobbler (two vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated openssl (multiple vulnerabilities).

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A Fedora 17 beta for ARM is now available. There are a number of images provided for various targets ("QEMU, Trimslice, Beagleboard XM and iMX based hardware platforms.") "We invite you to take part in making Fedora 17 for ARM a solid release by downloading, testing, and providing your valuable feedback. Please join us on the IRC in #fedora-arm on Freenode or send feedback and comments to the ARM mailing list."

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The H covers the debut of the Android Malware Genome Project by researchers from North Carolina State University. The team "has already collected more than 1,200 samples of Android malware, including GingerMaster and DroidKungFu, and has organised them into various malware families. [Xuxian] Jiang told Dark Reading that 'the purpose is to engage the research community to better our understanding of mobile threats and develop effective solutions against them.'" Access to the data set, however, is restricted.

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Panu Matilainen announces the release of RPM 4.10.0. Most of the changes targeted robustness and correctness, but a few new features crept in as well, including support for parsing the tilde (~) operator in package version numbers.

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Debian has updated sudo (privilege escalation) and libxml2 (arbitrary code execution).

Mandriva has updated ES 5.0 firefox (multiple vulnerabilities).

Ubuntu has updated net-snmp (denial of service).

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Over at Ars Technica, Dan Goodin writes about Trust Assertions for Certificate Keys (TACK), a proposed extension to SSL/TLS designed to discover fake certificates before they are accepted. "The opt-in system works by allowing SSL sites to sign valid SSL certificates, the domain name, and an expiration date with a TACK key. Once an end user has visited the site a few times using a TACK-compatible browser, a 'pin' for that site is activated on the user's computer. If the end user later encounters a forged certificate for that same site—as was the case when DigiNotar was breached—the browser will reject the session and return a warning to the user." One of TACK's co-creators is Moxie Marlinspike, who proposed the Convergence alternative certificate-management framework in 2011.

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Matt Godbolt announces GCC explorer, a web-based tool for exploring how code tweaks change the machine code emitted by the compiler. "Particularly with some of the newer features of C++11 — lambdas, move constructors, threading primitives etc — it’s nice to be able to see how your elegant code becomes beautiful (and maybe even fairly optimal) machine code." The GCC explorer code is on github for those who want to set up their own instance.

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Groklaw has the news: the jury in Oracle v. Google has found that Google did not infringe any of Oracle's patents.

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The H covers an announcement by the Open Source Initiative that Simon Phipps is the new president of the organization. "Phipps has already been spearheading an OSI reform process, working with the rest of the board to open up the organisation. That process has led to the creation of Open Source Initiative affiliation, bringing the Apache Software Foundation, FreeBSD, Eclipse, Mozilla, Debian, and Creative Commons, along with other organisations, on board as affiliates. "There will be further developments in that scheme soon, and we'll have much more to announce in other areas as the year progresses" said Phipps by email."

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