Welcome to LWN.net
LWN.net is a reader-supported news site dedicated to producing the best coverage from within the Linux and free software development communities. See the LWN FAQ for more information, and please consider subscribing to gain full access and support our activities.
[$] Reviving None-aware operators for Python
The idea of adding None-aware operators to Python has sprung up once again. These would make traversing structures with None values in them easier, by short-circuiting lookups when a None is encountered. Almost exactly a year ago, LWN covered the previous attempt to bring the operators to Python, but there have been periodic discussions stretching back to 2015 and possibly before. This time Noah Kim has taken up the cause. After some debate, he eventually settled on redrafting the existing PEP to have a more limited scope, which might finally see it move past the cycle of debate, resurrection, and abandonment that it has been stuck in for most of the last decade.
[$] The many names of commit 55039832f98c
The kernel is, on its face, a single large development project, but internally it is better viewed as 100 or so semi-independent projects all crammed into one big tent. Within those projects, there is a fair amount of latitude about how changes are managed, and some subsystems are using that freedom in the search for more efficient ways of working. In the end, though, all of these sub-projects have to work together and interface with kernel-wide efforts, including the stable-release and CVE-assignment processes. For some time, there has been friction between the direct rendering (DRM, or graphics) subsystem and the stable maintainers; that friction recently burst into view in a way that shows some of the limitations of how the kernel community manages patches.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 16, 2025
Posted Jan 16, 2025 3:51 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 16, 2025 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: Chimera Linux; Vim; Page-table hardening; Modifying system calls; Ghostty 1.0; TuxFamily.
- Briefs: rsync vulnerabilities; Linux Mint 22.1; Git v2.48.0; Libvirt v11.0.0; Rust 1.84.0; RIP Helen Borrie, Paolo Mantegazza, and Bill Gianopoulos; SFC lawsuit; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Ghostty 1.0 has been summoned
The Ghostty terminal emulator project has generated a surprising amount of interest, even before code was released to the public. This is in part due to the high profile of its creator, HashiCorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto. Its development was conducted behind closed doors for beta testing, until version 1.0 was released on December 26 under the MIT license. While far from finished, Ghostty is ready for day-to-day use and might be of interest to those who spend significant amounts of time at the command line.
[$] The slow death of TuxFamily
TuxFamily is a
French free-software-hosting service that has been in operation since
1999. It is a non-profit that accepts "any project
released under a free license
", whether that is a software license
or a free-content license, such as CC-BY-SA. It is also,
unfortunately, slowly dying due to hardware failures and lack of
interest. For example, the site's download servers are currently
offline with no plan to restore them.
[$] Modifying another process's system calls
The ptrace() system call allows a suitably privileged process to modify another in a large number of ways. Among other things, ptrace() can intercept system calls and make changes to them, but such operations can be fiddly and architecture-dependent. This patch series from Dmitry Levin seeks to improve that situation by adding a new ptrace() operation to make changes to another process's system calls in an architecture-independent manner.
[$] Chimera Linux works toward a simplified desktop
Chimera Linux is a new distribution
designed to be "simple, transparent, and easy to pick up
". The
distribution is built from scratch, and
recently announced its first beta release. While the documentation and
installation process are both a bit rough, the project already provides a
usable desktop with plenty of useful software — one built primarily on
tools adopted from BSD.
[$] The state of Vim
The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim
founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock
through the community, and raised concern about the future of the
project. At VimConf 2024 in
November, current Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt delivered a
keynote on "the new Vim project
" that detailed how the
community has reorganized itself to continue maintaining Vim and what
the future looks like.
[$] Page-table hardening with memory protection keys
Attacks on the kernel can take many forms; one popular exploitation path is to find a way to overwrite some memory with attacker-supplied data. If the right memory can be targeted, one well-targeted stray write is all that is needed to take control of the system. Since the system's page tables regulate access to memory, they are an attractive target for this type of attack. This patch set from Kevin Brodsky is an attempt to protect page tables (and, eventually, other data structures) using the "memory protection keys" feature provided by a number of CPU architectures.
LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 9, 2025
Posted Jan 9, 2025 0:12 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for January 9, 2025 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: What to expect in 2025; Sequoia; Emacs in Scheme; Pony; Homa; 2024 Timeline.
- Briefs: Colliding SHAs; netdev in 2024; Gentoo retrospective; LineageOS 22.1; pkgsrc-2024Q4; RIP Steve Langasek; Firefox 134.0; Algol 68; Ruby 3.4; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
The 6.13 kernel has been released
Linus has released
the 6.13 kernel. "So nothing horrible or unexpected happened last
week, so I've tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release
."
Significant features in this release include the lazy preemption model for CPU scheduling, Arm64 Guarded Control Stack support, the PIDFD_GET_INFO() operation, multi-grain file timestamps, beginning atomic write support for the ext4 and XFS filesystems, the setxattrat(), getxattrat(), listxattrat(), and removexattrat() system calls, private stacks for BPF programs, a new mechanism for adding guard pages to a memory mapping, the removal of the reiserfs filesystem, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.13 page for more information.
GDB 16.1 released
Version 16.1 of the GDB debugger is out. There are a lot of changes, including watchpoints for tagged data pointers, a new script to print the stack trace of a running process, better Intel Processor Trace support, and more.
A single Sunday stable kernel release
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.1.126 stable kernel to fix build failures with the 6.1.125 stable release.
Only upgrade if 6.1.125 did not build properly for you. If it did build properly, no need to upgrade. Thanks to Ron Economos for the fix for this issue.
LSFMM+BPF 2025 proposal deadline approaching
A reminder has gone out that the deadline for proposals for the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management and BPF Summit is February 1; anybody wanting to attend will need to make themselves known before then. The reminder also says that there will be no remote participation option (or live streams) this year.
Three stable kernel updates, as expected
The 6.12.10, 6.6.72, and 6.1.125 stable kernels have been released on the expected schedule.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (rsync and tomcat9), Fedora (chromium, mingw-python-jinja2, redict, and valkey), Gentoo (GIMP and pip), Oracle (.NET, fence-agents, ipa, kernel, python-virtualenv, raptor2, and rsync), Red Hat (.NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0), SUSE (apache2-mod_jk, git, git-lfs, kernel, python-Django, thunderbird, and xen), and Ubuntu (audacity, bcel, dotnet8, dotnet9, gimp-dds, harfbuzz, libxml2, poppler, rsync, and tqdm).
Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, raptor2, and rsync), Debian (chromium), Fedora (rsync and seamonkey), Mageia (openjpeg2), Red Hat (tuned), Slackware (git), SUSE (dcmtk, dnsmasq, govulncheck-vulndb, libQtWebKit4, libraptor-devel, opera, python311-Pillow, python311-translate-toolkit, rsync, and SDL2_sound-devel), and Ubuntu (linux-raspi-5.4, neomutt, and python2.7).
Libvirt v11.0.0 released
Version 11.0.0 of the libvirt virtualization API has been released. Notable changes in this release include the ability to export virtiofs filesystems in read-only mode, the addition of support for vlan tagging and trunking of network interfaces with the network, qemu, and lxc drivers, as well as a number of bug fixes.
RIP Helen Borrie
We have just now received word of the passing of Helen Borrie, a longtime contributor to the Firebird relational database project.
Helen's quiet leadership and dedication left a lasting impact on Firebird and its users. Her efforts helped build not just a powerful database but also a strong, collaborative community. She will be deeply missed by all who knew her and benefited from her work.
She will be greatly missed. (Thanks to Steve Friedl.)
Linux Mint 22.1 released
Linux Mint version 22.1, a long-term-support (LTS) release with support until 2029, is now available. Notable changes in this release include a transition to Aptkit for background package management tasks, Captain to install Debian packages, and a new default theme with improved Wayland compatibility. See the release notes for known issues.
