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[$] JupyterLab 4.0: a development environment for education and research
JupyterLab is a web-based development environment widely used by data scientists, engineers, and educators for data visualization, data analysis, prototyping, and interactive learning materials. The Jupyter community has recently announced the release of JupyterLab 4.0, introducing lots of new features and performance improvements to enhance its capabilities both in research and educational settings.
[$] Converting filesystems to iomap
A discussion that largely centered around the documentation of iomap, which provides a block-mapping interface for modern filesystems, was led by Luis Chamberlain at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit. There is an ongoing process of converting filesystems to use iomap, in order to leave buffer heads behind and to better support folios, so the intent was to get feedback on the documentation from developers who are working on those conversions. One of the concrete outcomes of the session was a plan to move that documentation from its current location on the KernelNewbies wiki into the kernel documentation.
[$] Development statistics for 6.4
The 6.4 kernel was released on June 25 after a nine-week development cycle. By that point, 14,835 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline kernel, a slight increase from 6.3 (14,424 changesets) but still lower than many other development cycles. As usual, LWN has taken a look at those changesets, who contributed them, and what the most active developers were up to.
[$] Removing the kthread freezer
The final day of the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit featured three separate sessions led by Luis Chamberlain (he also led a plenary on day two); the first of those was a filesystem session on the status of the kthread-freezer-removal effort. The kthread freezer is meant to help filesystems freeze their state in order to suspend or hibernate the system, but since at least 2015, the freezer has been targeted for removal. Things did not change much a year later, nor by LSFMM in 2018 when Chamberlain had picked up Jiri Kosina's removal effort; this year, Chamberlain was back to try to push things along.
[$] Reports from OSPM 2023, part 3
The fifth conference on Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel (abbreviated "OSPM") was held on April 17 to 19 in Ancona, Italy. LWN was not there, unfortunately, but the attendees of the event have gotten together to write up summaries of the discussions that took place and LWN has the privilege of being able to publish them. Reports from the third and final day of the event appear below.
[$] Delegating privilege with BPF tokens
The quest to enable limited use of BPF features in unprivileged processes continues. In the previous episode, an attempt to use authoritative Linux security module (LSM) hooks for this purpose was strongly rejected by the LSM developers. BPF developer Andrii Nakryiko has now returned with a new mechanism based on a privilege-conveying token. That approach, too, has run into some resistance, but a solution for the strongest concerns might be in sight.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 22, 2023
Posted Jun 22, 2023 1:27 UTC (Thu)The LWN.net Weekly Edition for June 22, 2023 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
- Front: PostgreSQL; Scope-based resource management; LSFMM+BPF coverage; OSPM coverage; Armbian 23.05.
- Briefs: RHEL source availability; Faster CPython for 3.13; Rust Leadership Council; Free-software messaging; LPC 2023; Quotes; ...
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
[$] Merging copy offload
Kernel support for copy offload is a feature that has been floating around in limbo for a decade or more at this point; it has been implemented along the way, but never merged. The idea is that the host system can simply ask a block storage device to copy some data within the device and it will do so without further involving the host; instead of reading data into the host so that it can be written back out again, the device circumvents that process. At the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit, Nitesh Shetty led a storage and filesystem session to discuss the current status of a patch set that he and others have been working on, with an eye toward getting something merged fairly soon.
[$] Armbian 23.05: optimized for single-board computers
Running a Linux distribution on Arm-based single-board computers (SBCs) is still not as easy as on x86 systems because many Arm devices require a vendor-supplied kernel, a patched bootloader, and other device-specific components. One distribution that addresses this problem is Armbian, which offers Debian- and Ubuntu-based distributions for many devices. The headline feature in the recent release, Armbian 23.05, which came at the end of May, is a major rework of the build framework that has been made faster and more reliable after three years of development.
[$] Backporting XFS fixes to stable
Backporting fixes to stable kernels is an ongoing process that, in general, is handled by the stable maintainers or the developers of the fixes. However, due to some unhappiness in the XFS development community with the process of handling stable fixes for that filesystem, a different process has come about for backporting XFS patches to the stable kernels. The three developers doing that work, Leah Rumancik, Amir Goldstein, and Chandan Babu Rajendra, led a plenary session at the 2023 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management and BPF Summit (with Rajendra participating remotely) to discuss that process.
Stable kernel updates for Wednesday
The 6.3.10, 6.1.36, 5.15.119, 5.10.186, 5.4.249, 4.19.288, and 4.14.320 stable kernels have all been released; each contains another set of important fixes.
Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by Mageia (docker-docker-registry, libcap, libx11, mediawiki, python-requests, python-tornado, sofia-sip, sqlite, and xonotic), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libssh, libtiff, python27:2.7, python39:3.9, python39-devel:3.9, ruby:2.7, sqlite, systemd, and virt:rhel, virt-devel:rhel), SUSE (bind, cosign, guile1, lilypond, keepass, kubernetes1.24, nodejs16, nodejs18, phpMyAdmin, and sqlite3), and Ubuntu (etcd).
Ekstrand: NVK update: Enabling new extensions, conformance status & more
Faith Ekstrand has provided an update on the status of the NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs.
Probably the single most common question I get from folks is, "When will NVK be in upstream mesa?" The short answer is that it'll be upstreamed along with the new kernel API. The new API is going to be required in order to implement Vulkan correctly in a bunch of cases. Even though it mostly works on top of upstream nouveau, I don't want to be maintaining support for that interface for another 10 years when it only partially works.We don't yet have an exact timetable for when the new API will be ready. I'm currently hoping that we get it all upstream this year but I can't say when exactly.
Security updates for Tuesday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (c-ares and libx11), Fedora (chromium and kubernetes), Red Hat (python3 and python38:3.8, python38-devel:3.8), and SUSE (amazon-ssm-agent, kernel, kubernetes1.24, libvirt, nodejs16, openssl-1_1, and webkit2gtk3).
McGrath: Red Hat’s commitment to open source
Red Hat's Mike McGrath responds to the many criticisms aimed at the company since it changed its policy regarding RHEL source code.
Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make. That brings me to CentOS Stream, of which there is immense confusion. I acknowledge that this is a change in a longstanding tradition where we went above and beyond, and change like this can cause some confusion. That confusion manifested as accusations about us going closed-source and about alleged GPL violations. There is CentOS Stream the binary deliverable, and CentOS Stream the source repository. The CentOS Stream gitlab source is where we build RHEL releases, in the open for all to see. To call RHEL “closed source” is categorically untrue and inaccurate. CentOS Stream moves faster than RHEL, so it might not be on HEAD, but the code is there. If you can’t find it, it’s a bug – please let us know.
Security updates for Monday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bind9 and owslib), Fedora (dav1d, dotnet6.0, dotnet7.0, mingw-dbus, vim, and wabt), and SUSE (cloud-init and golang-github-vpenso-prometheus_slurm_exporter).
The 6.4 kernel has been released
Linus has released the 6.4 kernel.
Most of the stuff in my mailbox the last week has been about upcoming things for 6.5, and I already have 15 pull requests pending. I appreciate all you proactive people.But that's for tomorrow. Today we're all busy build-testing the newest kernel release, and checking that it's all good. Right?
Headline features in this release include: generic iterators for BPF, the removal of the SELinux runtime disable knob, the removal of the SLOB memory allocator, linear address masking support on Intel CPUs, process-level samepage merging control, support for user trace events, more infrastructure for writing kernel modules in Rust, per-VMA locks, and much more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2), and the (in-progress) KernelNewbies 6.4 page for the details.
Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model
Over on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence Bradley M. Kuhn analyzes the recent changes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source availability in light of the GPL. It contains some interesting information about two alleged GPL violations that came about because the company's business model is structured in a way that brings it too close to non-compliance with the license, he said:
Perhaps the biggest problem with a murky business model that skirts the line of GPL compliance is that violations can and do happen — since even a minor deviation from the business model clearly violates the GPL agreements. Pre-IBM Red Hat deserves a certain amount of credit, as SFC is aware of only two documented incidents of GPL violations that have occurred since 2006 regarding the RHEL business model. We've decided to share some general details of these violations for the purpose of explaining where this business model can so easily cross the line.[...] In another violation incident, we learned that Red Hat, in a specific non-USA country, was requiring that any customer who lowered the number of RHEL machines under service contract with Red Hat sign an additional agreement. This additional agreement promised that the customer had deleted every copy of RHEL in their entire organization other than the copies of RHEL that were currently contracted for service with Red Hat. Again, this is a "further restriction". The GPL agreements give everyone the unfettered right to make and keep as many copies of the software as they like, and a distributor of GPL'd software may not require a user to attest that they've deleted these legitimate, licensed copies of third-party-licensed software under the GPL. SFC informed Red Hat's legal department of this violation, and we were assured that this additional agreement would no longer be presented to any Red Hat customers in the future.
Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (asterisk, lua5.3, and trafficserver), Fedora (tang and trafficserver), Oracle (.NET 7.0, c-ares, firefox, openssl, postgresql, python3, texlive, and thunderbird), Red Hat (python27:2.7 and python39:3.9 and python39-devel:3.9), Scientific Linux (c-ares), Slackware (cups), SUSE (cups, dav1d, google-cloud-sap-agent, java-1_8_0-openjdk, libX11, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, openvswitch, and python-sqlparse), and Ubuntu (cups, dotnet6, dotnet7, and openssl).
AlmaLinux's response to Red Hat's policy change
The AlmaLinux organization has posted a message describing the impact of Red Hat's decision to stop releasing the source to the RHEL distribution and how AlmaLinux will respond.
In the immediate term, our plan is to pull from CentOS Stream updates and Oracle Linux updates to ensure security patches continue to be released. These updates will be carefully curated to ensure they are 1:1 compatible with RHEL, while not violating Red Hat’s licensing, and will be vetted and tested just like all of our other releases.
Update: Rocky Linux has also sent out a
release on the subject. "There will be no disruption or change for
any Rocky Linux users, collaborators, or partners
".