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[$] A new hash algorithm for Git
[Development] Posted Feb 3, 2020 17:10 UTC (Mon) by corbet

The Git source-code management system is famously built on the SHA‑1 hashing algorithm, which has become an increasingly weak foundation over the years. SHA‑1 is now considered to be broken and, despite the fact that it does not yet seem to be so broken that it could be used to compromise Git repositories, users are increasingly worried about its security. The good news is that work on moving Git past SHA‑1 has been underway for some time, and is slowly coming to fruition; there is a version of the code that can be looked at now.

Full Story (comments: none)

Security updates for Monday
[Security] Posted Feb 3, 2020 15:45 UTC (Mon) by ris

Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (opensmtpd), Debian (firefox-esr, libidn2, libjackson-json-java, prosody-modules, qemu, qtbase-opensource-src, spamassassin, and sudo), Fedora (e2fsprogs, java-1.8.0-openjdk, mingw-openjpeg2, openjpeg2, samba, sox, upx, webkit2gtk3, and xar), Red Hat (git), Scientific Linux (git), Slackware (sudo), SUSE (ceph and rmt-server), and Ubuntu (sudo).

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[$] Accelerating netfilter with hardware offload, part 2
[Kernel] Posted Jan 31, 2020 16:49 UTC (Fri) by corbet

As network interfaces get faster, the amount of CPU time available to process each packet becomes correspondingly smaller. The good news is that many tasks, including packet filtering, can be offloaded to the hardware itself. The bad news is that the Linux kernel required quite a bit of work to be able to take advantage of that capability. The first article in this series provided an overview of how hardware-based packet filtering can work and the support for this feature that already existed in the kernel. This series now concludes with a detailed look at how offloaded packet filtering works in the netfilter subsystem and how administrators can make use of it.

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GNU C Library 2.31 released
[Development] Posted Feb 1, 2020 16:24 UTC (Sat) by corbet

The GNU libc 2.31 release is out. Significant changes include some initial C2X standard support, some DNS stub resolver changes, a new pthread_clockjoin_np() POSIX threads extension, a number of changes to time-related functions, and more.

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[$] The 5.6 merge window opens
[Kernel] Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:18 UTC (Thu) by corbet

As of this writing, 4,726 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.6 development cycle. That is a relatively slow start by contemporary kernel standards, but it still is enough to bring a number of new features, some of which have been pending for years, into the mainline. Read on for a summary of the changes pulled in the early part of the 5.6 merge window.

Full Story (comments: 6)

Some weekend stable kernel updates
[Kernel] Posted Feb 1, 2020 16:21 UTC (Sat) by corbet

The 5.5.1, 5.4.17, and 4.19.101 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains another set of important fixes.

Comments (none posted)

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 30, 2020
Posted Jan 30, 2020 0:32 UTC (Thu)

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 30, 2020 is available.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

  • Front: Cryptography and elections; Fedora's git forge; io_uring; Kernel documentation; 5.5 Development statistics.
  • Briefs: OpenSMTPD vuln; Linux 5.5; LibreOffice 6.4; Qt changes; Librem 5; Thunderbird spun out; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters; conferences; security updates; kernel patches; ...
Read more

The Yocto Project mourns Scott Rifenbark
[Briefs] Posted Jan 31, 2020 22:16 UTC (Fri) by jake

The longtime tech writer for the Yocto Project, Scott Rifenbark, has died after a battle with cancer. Project architect Richard Purdie announced the sad news on the yocto mailing list; he also reflected on Rifenbark and his impact: "I remember interviewing Scott over 10 years ago when forming a team at Intel to work on what became the Yocto Project, he was with it from the start. He warned me he wasn't an entirely traditional tech writer but I warned we weren't aiming to be a traditional project either. It was a great match. He stayed with the project ever since in one way or another, he enjoyed working on the project and we enjoyed working with him. The concept of having a tech writer as part of the team was a decision I'm proud of and it shows in the material supporting the project today but that success belongs to Scott and his approach to it. Someone else put that best, 'He would first try the procedure or instructions before documenting it, I was really impressed'. He was hands on and wanted things to be understandable and correct, a huge challenge with some of the complexities we deal with."

Comments (4 posted)

[$] Fedora gathering requirements for a Git forge
[Distributions] Posted Jan 29, 2020 21:32 UTC (Wed) by jake

Fedora currently uses Pagure to host many of its Git repositories and to handle things like documentation and bug tracking. But Pagure is maintained by the Red Hat Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team, which is currently straining under the load of managing the infrastructure and tools for Fedora and CentOS, while also maintaining the tools used by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) team. That has led to a discussion about identifying the requirements for a "Git forge" and possibly moving away from Pagure.

Full Story (comments: 21)

Security updates for Friday
[Security] Posted Jan 31, 2020 14:15 UTC (Fri) by jake

Security updates have been issued by Debian (libsolv, libxmlrpc3-java, openjpeg2, qemu, and suricata), Fedora (ansible, chromium, java-latest-openjdk, links, mingw-openjpeg2, nss, openjpeg2, python-pillow, thunderbird, webkit2gtk3, and xen), Mageia (gdal, java-1.8.0-openjdk, mariadb, openjpeg2, and sqlite3), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (rh-java-common-xmlrpc), SUSE (e2fsprogs, ImageMagick, php72, tigervnc, and wicked), and Ubuntu (keystone).

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[$] Cryptography and elections
[Front] Posted Jan 28, 2020 22:17 UTC (Tue) by jake

Transparent and verifiable electronic elections are technically feasible, but for a variety of reasons, the techniques used are not actually viable for running most elections—and definitely not for remote voting. That was one of the main takeaways from a keynote at this year's linux.conf.au given by University of Melbourne Associate Professor Vanessa Teague. She is a cryptographer who, along with her colleagues, has investigated several kinds of e-voting software; as is probably not all that much of a surprise, what they found is buggy implementations. She described some of that work in a talk that was a mix of math with software-company and government missteps; the latter may directly impact many of the Australian locals who were in attendance.

Full Story (comments: 137)

Lars Kurth RIP
[Briefs] Posted Jan 30, 2020 16:13 UTC (Thu) by jake

Ian Jackson posted a note to the xen-announce mailing list with the sad news that Xen community manager and project advisory board member Lars Kurth has died. "I'm very sad to inform you that Lars Kurth passed away earlier this week. Many of us regarded Lars as a personal friend, and his loss is a great loss to the Xen Project. We plan to have a tribute to Lars on the XenProject blog in the near future. Those who are attending FOSDEM may wish to attend the short tribute we plan for Sunday morning: https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/vai_memory_of_lars_kurth/"

Comments (1 posted)

[$] Some 5.5 kernel development statistics
[Kernel] Posted Jan 28, 2020 2:59 UTC (Tue) by corbet

The 5.5 kernel was released on January 26. Over the course of this development cycle, it was occasionally said that the holidays were slowing contributions. At the end, though, 5.5 saw the merging of 14,350 non-merge changesets from 1,885 developers — not exactly a slow-moving cycle. Indeed, 5.5 just barely edged out 5.4 as the kernel with the most developers ever. Read on for our traditional look at where the contributions to 5.5 came from, along with a digression into the stable-update process.

Full Story (comments: 5)

A new stable kernel crop
[Kernel] Posted Jan 30, 2020 15:01 UTC (Thu) by jake

Five new stable kernels have been released: 5.4.16, 4.19.100, 4.14.169, 4.9.212, and 4.4.212. As usual, each contains important fixes throughout the kernel tree. Users should upgrade.

Comments (none posted)

[$] The rapid growth of io_uring
[Kernel] Posted Jan 24, 2020 17:01 UTC (Fri) by corbet

One year ago, the io_uring subsystem did not exist in the mainline kernel; it showed up in the 5.1 release in May 2019. At its core, io_uring is a mechanism for performing asynchronous I/O, but it has been steadily growing beyond that use case and adding new capabilities. Herein we catch up with the current state of io_uring, where it is headed, and an interesting question or two that will come up along the way.

Full Story (comments: 29)

Security updates for Thursday
[Security] Posted Jan 30, 2020 14:43 UTC (Thu) by jake

Security updates have been issued by Debian (graphicsmagick, opensmtpd, webkit2gtk, wget, and zlib), openSUSE (apt-cacher-ng, GraphicsMagick, java-1_8_0-openjdk, mailman, mumble, rubygem-excon, sarg, and shadowsocks-libev), Oracle (libarchive and openjpeg2), Red Hat (firefox, fribidi, openjpeg2, SDL, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (openjpeg2), SUSE (glibc, java-1_8_0-openjdk, and rmt-server), and Ubuntu (Apache Solr and webkit2gtk).

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[$] How to contribute to kernel documentation
[Kernel] Posted Jan 23, 2020 23:13 UTC (Thu) by corbet

Some years back, I was caught in a weak moment and somehow became the kernel documentation maintainer. More recently, I've given a few talks on the state of kernel documentation and the sort of work that needs to be done to make things better. A key part of getting that work done is communicating to potential contributors the tasks that they might helpfully take on — a list that was, naturally, entirely undocumented. To that end, a version of the following document is currently under review and headed for the mainline. Read on to see how you, too, can help to make the kernel's documentation better.

Full Story (comments: 14)

Unpleasant vulnerability in OpenSMTPD
[Security] Posted Jan 29, 2020 16:08 UTC (Wed) by corbet

Qualys has put out an advisory regarding a vulnerability in OpenBSD's OpenSMTPD mail server. It "allows an attacker to execute arbitrary shell commands, as root: either locally, in OpenSMTPD's default configuration (which listens on the loopback interface and only accepts mail from localhost); or locally and remotely, in OpenSMTPD's 'uncommented' default configuration (which listens on all interfaces and accepts external mail)." OpenBSD users would be well advised to update quickly.

Full Story (comments: 20)

LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 23, 2020
Posted Jan 23, 2020 0:48 UTC (Thu)

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 23, 2020 is available.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition

  • Front: Snek; Control-flow integrity for the kernel; Android display scheduling; KRSI; process_madvise()
  • Briefs: Fedora CoreOS; Guile 3; make 4.3; PHP; Wine 5; Quotes; ...
  • Announcements: Newsletters; conferences; security updates; kernel patches; ...
Read more

Security updates for Wednesday
[Security] Posted Jan 29, 2020 15:54 UTC (Wed) by ris

Security updates have been issued by CentOS (apache-commons-beanutils, java-1.8.0-openjdk, libarchive, openjpeg2, openslp, python-reportlab, and sqlite), Debian (hiredis, otrs2, and unzip), openSUSE (apt-cacher-ng, git, samba, sarg, and storeBackup), Oracle (openjpeg2), Red Hat (libarchive, openjpeg2, sqlite, and virt:rhel), SUSE (aws-cli and python-reportlab), and Ubuntu (libgcrypt11, linux-aws-5.0, linux-gcp, linux-gke-5.0, linux-oracle-5.0, linux-hwe, linux-hwe, linux-aws-hwe, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, and openjdk-8, openjdk-lts).

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