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The Linux kernel is highly scalable but, while it runs nicely on the world's largest computers, it is not an entirely comfortable fit on the smallest. The difficulties involved in running Linux on machines with 1MB or less of memory have left an opening for other operating systems, such as Zephyr, with lower memory needs. Some developers have not given up on scaling Linux to the smallest computers, but the approaches they have to take have always been a bit of a hard sell with the rest of the development community. Nicolas Pitre's minitty patch set is a case in point.
The 4.11 kernel has been released. "So after that extra week with an rc8, things were pretty calm, and I'm much happier releasing a final 4.11 now." Some headline features in 4.11 include: a new perf ftrace command restarting the work of better integrating the perf and ftrace subsystems, I/O scheduling support for the multiqueue block subsystem, journaling for device-mapper RAID 4/5/6 volumes, SipHash support, some swapping scalability improvements, a new LZ4 compression implementation, the new statx() system call, and more. As always, see the KernelNewbies 4.11 page for lots of details.
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 27, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Xda developers looks at improvements coming to the F-Droid repository of free/open source apps for Android. The next version of F-Droid will have screenshot and feature graphics, bulk download and install, improved notifications for downloads and pending updates, and the ability to translate apps metadata. "F-Droid is conducting further field tests to ensure that usability issues with the new design are identified and resolved before the alpha releases for v0.103 is rolled out to the public. The team is also inviting feedback and suggestions to further improve the client. Additionally, the team mentions that this is one of the many improvements happening to the broader F-Droid ecosystem in 2017, and there’s more to come."
Sayre's law states: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake". In that context, it is perhaps easy to understand why the discussion around the version number for the next major openSUSE Leap release has gone on for hundreds of sometimes vitriolic messages. While this change is controversial, the openSUSE board hopes that it will lead to more rational versioning in the long term — but the world has a way of interfering with such plans.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (jenkins, libtiff, and webkit2gtk), Debian (ghostscript, kernel, and libreoffice), Fedora (dovecot, kernel, and tomcat), Mageia (firefox and tomcat), openSUSE (backintime and ffmpeg), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, libxslt, and nss).
An email client was once a mandatory offering for any operating system, but that may be changing. A discussion on the ubuntu-desktop mailing list explores the choices for a default email client for Ubuntu 17.10, which is due in October. One of the possibilities being considered is to not have a default email client at all.
The Debian release team has a few words about the upcoming Debian 9 "stretch" release. "At a recent team meeting, we decided that support for Secure Boot in the forthcoming Debian 9 "stretch" would no longer be a blocker to release. The likely, although not certain outcome is that stretch will not have Secure Boot support." If stretch does not release with Secure Boot support, it is possible that it will be introduced later. Other than that, the number of Release Critical bugs continues to drop and the team is considering the arrangements for the stretch release.
The Drupal content management system (CMS) has been an open-source tool of choice for many web site owners for well over a decade now. Over that time, it has been overseen by its original developer, Dries Buytaert, who is often referred to as the benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) for the project. Some recent events have led a sizable contingent in the Drupal community to question his leadership, however. A request that a prominent developer leave the Drupal community, apparently over elements of his private life rather than any Drupal-related misstep, has led to something of an outcry in that community—it may well lead to a change in the governance of the project.
Tor 0.3.0.6, the first stable release of the Tor 0.3.0 series, is available. "With the 0.3.0 series, clients and relays now use Ed25519 keys to authenticate their link connections to relays, rather than the old RSA1024 keys that they used before. (Circuit crypto has been Curve25519-authenticated since 0.2.4.8-alpha.) We have also replaced the guard selection and replacement algorithm to behave more robustly in the presence of unreliable networks, and to resist guard- capture attacks."
The multiqueue block layer subsystem, introduced in 2013, was a necessary step for the kernel to scale to the fastest storage devices on large systems. The implementation in current kernels is incomplete, though, in that it lacks an I/O scheduler designed to work with multiqueue devices. That gap is currently set to be closed in the 4.12 development cycle when the kernel will probably get not just one, but two new multiqueue I/O schedulers.
The scheduler is a topic of keen interest for the desktop user; the scheduling algorithm partially determines the responsiveness of the Linux desktop as a whole. Con Kolivas maintains a series of scheduler patch sets that he has tuned considerably over the years for his own use, focusing primarily on latency reduction for a better desktop experience. In early October 2016, Kolivas updated the design of his popular desktop scheduler patch set, which he renamed MuQSS. It is an update (and a name change) from his previous scheduler, BFS, and it is designed to address scalability concerns that BFS had with an increasing number of CPUs.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (freetype, jasper, python-django, slurm-llnl, and weechat), Fedora (dovecot and pcre2), Gentoo (adobe-flash), openSUSE (curl, gstreamer-plugins-base, libsndfile, and tiff), and Ubuntu (mysql-5.5, mysql-5.7).
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 20, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Security updates have been issued by Debian (botan1.10, mysql-5.5, and rtmpdump), Fedora (collectd, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, libdwarf, nss-softokn, nss-util, and tigervnc), Red Hat (httpd24-httpd and python27), and SUSE (kernel).
Linux usage in networking hardware has been on the rise for some time. During the latest Netdev conference held in Montreal this April, people talked seriously about Linux running on high end, "top of rack" (TOR) networking equipment. Those devices have long been the realm of proprietary hardware and software companies like Cisco or Juniper, but Linux seems to be making some significant headway into the domain. Are we really seeing the rise of Linux in high-end networking hardware?
The grsecurity project has announced that its kernel-hardening patches will now be an entirely private affair. "Today we are handing over future maintenance of grsecurity test patches to the community. This makes grsecurity for Linux 4.9 the last version Open Source Security Inc. will release to non-subscribers."
Linus Torvalds recently let it be known that the 4.11-rc7 kernel prepatch had a good chance of being the last for this development series. So the time has come to look at this development cycle and the contributors who made it happen.
The Kali Linux 2017.1 rolling release is available. Kali is a Debian derivative aimed at penetration testing and related tasks. This release includes support for RTL8812AU wireless card injection, streamlined support for CUDA GPU cracking, OpenVAS 9 packaged in Kali repositories, and more.
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