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As the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes ever more populous, there is no shortage of people warning us that the continual infusion into our lives of hard-to-patch proprietary devices running hard-to-maintain proprietary code is a bit of a problem. It is an act of faith for some, myself included, that open devices running free software (whether IoT devices or not) are easier to maintain than proprietary, closed ones. So it's always of interest when freedom (or something close to it) makes its way into a class of devices that were not previously so blessed.
Subscribers can click below for a look at the NumWorks graphing calculator by guest author Tom Yates.
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 28, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (chromium-browser and poppler), Oracle (kernel), and Slackware (gegl).
At last year's X.Org Developers Conference (XDC), James Jones began the process of coming up with an API for allocating memory so that it is accessible to multiple different graphics devices in a system (e.g. GPUs, hardware compositors, video decoders, display hardware, cameras, etc.). At XDC 2017 in Mountain View, CA, he was back to update attendees on the progress that has been made. He has a prototype in progress, but there is plenty more to do, including working out some of the problems he has encountered along the way.
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced that Microsoft has joined the organization as a Premium Sponsor. "Microsoft's history with the OSI dates back to 2005 with the submission of the Microsoft Community License, then again in August of 2007 with the submission of the Microsoft Permissive License. For many in the open source software community, it was Microsoft's release of .NET in 2014 under an open source license that may have first caught their attention. Microsoft has increasingly participated in open source projects and communities as users, contributors, and creators, and has released even more open source products like Visual Studio Code and Typescript."
In the refereed track at the 2017 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), Jiri Kosina gave an update on the status and plans for the live kernel patching feature. It is a feature that has a long history—pre-dating Linux itself—and has had a multi-year path into the kernel. Kosina reviewed that history, while also looking at some of the limitations and missing features for live patching.
Oath, parent company of Yahoo, has announced that it has released Vespa as an open source project on GitHub. "Building applications increasingly means dealing with huge amounts of data. While developers can use the the Hadoop stack to store and batch process big data, and Storm to stream-process data, these technologies do not help with serving results to end users. Serving is challenging at large scale, especially when it is necessary to make computations quickly over data while a user is waiting, as with applications that feature search, recommendation, and personalization. By releasing Vespa, we are making it easy for anyone to build applications that can compute responses to user requests, over large datasets, at real time and at internet scale – capabilities that up until now, have been within reach of only a few large companies." (Thanks to Paul Wise)
The Fedora project's four "foundations" are named "Freedom", "Friends", "Features", and "First". Among other things, they commit the project to being firmly within the free-software camp ("we believe that advancing software and content freedom is a central goal for the Fedora Project, and that we should accomplish that goal through the use of the software and content we promote") and to providing leading-edge software, including current kernels. Given that the kernel project, too, is focused on free software, it is interesting to see a call within the Fedora community to hold back on kernel updates in order to be able to support a proprietary driver.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (weechat), Debian (debsecan, git, ruby1.8, ruby1.9.1, rubygems, and weechat), Fedora (kernel, libbson, and oniguruma), Gentoo (tiff), openSUSE (tor), Oracle (augeas, samba, and samba4), Red Hat (kernel), and Scientific Linux (kernel).
Doing realtime processing with a general-purpose operating-system like Linux can be a challenge by itself, but safety-critical realtime processing ups the ante considerably. During a session at Open Source Summit North America, Wolfgang Maurer discussed the difficulties involved in this kind of work and what Linux has to offer.
Ars technica takes a look at the Firefox 57 developer edition. "More important, but less immediately visible, is that Firefox 57 has received a ton of performance enhancement. Project Quantum has several strands to it: Mozilla has developed a new CSS engine, Stylo, that parses CSS files, applies the styling rules to elements on the page, and calculates object sizes and positions. There is also a new rendering engine, WebRender, that uses the GPU to draw the (styled) elements of the page. Compositor combines the individual rendered elements and builds them into a complete page, while Quantum DOM changes how JavaScript runs, especially in background tabs. As well as this new development, there's a final part, Quantum Flow, which has focused on fixing bugs and adding optimizations to those parts of the browser that aren't being redeveloped. WebRender is due to arrive in Firefox 59, but the rest of Quantum is part of Firefox 57."
The "tracing and BPF" microconference was held on the final day of the 2017 Linux Plumbers Conference; it covered a number of topics relevant to heavy users of kernel and user-space tracing. Read on for a summary of a number of those discussions on topics like BPF introspection, stack traces, kprobes, uprobes, and the Common Trace Format.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and libraw), Gentoo (chromium, libsoup, and rar), openSUSE (openjpeg and openjpeg2), Scientific Linux (samba), and Ubuntu (libplist).
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 21, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bzr, clamav, libgd2, libraw, samba, and tomcat7), Fedora (drupal7-views, gnome-shell, httpd, krb5, libmspack, LibRaw, mingw-LibRaw, mpg123, pkgconf, python-jwt, and samba), Gentoo (adobe-flash, chromium, cvs, exim, mercurial, oracle-jdk-bin, php, postfix, and tcpdump), openSUSE (Chromium and libraw), Red Hat (chromium-browser), and Slackware (libxml2 and python).
In a talk in the refereed track of the 2017 Linux Plumbers Conference, Alexandre Courouble presented the email2git tool that links kernel commits to their review discussion on the mailing lists. Email2git is a plugin for cregit, which implements token-level history for a Git repository; we covered a talk on cregit just over one year ago. Email2git combines cregit with Patchwork to link the commit to a patch and its discussion threads from any of the mailing lists that are scanned by patchwork.kernel.org. The result is a way to easily find the discussion that led to a piece of code—or even just a token—changing in the kernel source tree.
The 4.14-rc2 kernel prepatch is out. "Nothing stands out, although hopefully we've gotten over all the x86 ASID issues. Knock wood."
Over the years, there has been a persistent effort to build the Linux kernel using the Clang C compiler that is part of the LLVM project. We last looked in on the effort in a report from the LLVM microconference at the 2015 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), but we have followed it before that as well. At this year's LPC, two Google kernel engineers, Greg Hackmann and Nick Desaulniers, came to the Android microconference to update the status; at this point, it is possible to build two long-term support kernels (4.4 and 4.9) with Clang.
GitLab 10.0 has been released. "With every monthly release of GitLab, we introduce new capabilities and improve our existing features. GitLab 10.0 is no exception and includes numerous new additions, such as the ability to automatically resolve outdated merge request discussions, improvements to subgroups, and an API for Wiki thanks to a contribution from our open source community."
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