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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 10, 2020 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
Unlike many of the previous gatherings of the Linux realtime developers, their microconference at the virtual 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference had a different feel about it. Instead of being about when and how to get the feature into the mainline, the microconference had two sessions that looked at what happens after the realtime patches are upstream. That has not quite happened yet, but is likely for the 5.10 kernel, so the developers were looking to the future of the stable realtime trees and, relatedly, plans for continuous-integration (CI) testing for realtime kernels.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (grunt), Fedora (ansible and geary), openSUSE (firefox, gettext-runtime, python-Flask-Cors, and thunderbird), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Red Hat (.NET Core 3.1), SUSE (kernel and libjpeg-turbo), and Ubuntu (gnutls28 and libx11).
BPF is, of course, the language used for network (and other) customization in the Linux kernel, but some people have been using the Lua language for the networking side of that equation. Two developers from Ring-0 Networks, Lourival Vieira Neto and Victor Nogueira, came to the virtual Netdev 0x14 to present that work. It consists of a framework to allow the injection of Lua scripts into the running kernel as well as two projects aimed at routers, one of which is deployed on 20 million devices.
Android 11 has been released with the source pushed to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). "For developers, Android 11 has a ton of new capabilities. You’ll want to check out conversation notifications, device and media controls, one-time permissions, enhanced 5G support, IME transitions, and so much more. To help you work and develop faster, we also added new tools like compatibility toggles, ADB incremental installs, app exit reasons API, data access auditing API, Kotlin nullability annotations, and many others."
The kernel does not have just one system call to rename a file; instead, there are three of them: rename(), renameat(), and renameat2(). Each was added when the previous one proved unable to support a new feature. A similar story has played out with a number of system calls: a feature is needed that doesn't fit into the existing interfaces, so a new one is created — again. At the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference, Christian Brauner and Aleksa Sarai ran a pair of sessions focused on the creation of future-proof system calls that can be extended when the need for new features arises.
Alyssa Rosenzweig looks at getting the Exposure Notifications System protocol, developed by Apple and Google for facilitating COVID-19 contact tracing on Android and iOS phones, running on GNU/Linux. "All in all, we end up with a Linux implementation of Exposure Notifications functional in Ontario, Canada. What’s next? Perhaps supporting contact tracing systems elsewhere in the world – patches welcome." The source code for liben is available "for any one who dares go near".
Back in 2014, a Raspberry Pi enthusiast by the name of Michael Teeuw shared his build of a "magic mirror" with the world in a six-part series. The system consisted of a Raspberry Pi and monitor running a web browser in kiosk mode, with a web server that provided a dashboard interface — all stored in a custom-built case with a one-way mirror. Since his post, others around the world have built these devices for their home (including myself), forming both a community and an interesting open-source project. The recent release of MagicMirror2 (MM2) version 2.12.0 gives us an opportunity to learn more about where the project started and where it is today.
The GStreamer team has announced a major feature release of GStreamer. "The 1.18 release series adds new features on top of the previous 1.16 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework." There is a lengthy list of highlights in the announcement and more details in the release notes.
The 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) was meant to be held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada at the end of August. As it happens, your editor was on the organizing committee for that event and thus got a close view of what happens when one's hopes for discussing memory-management changes on the Canadian eastern seaboard become one of the many casualties of an ongoing pandemic. Transforming LPC into a successful online experience was a lot of work, but the results more than justified the effort. Read on for some notes and thoughts from the experience of making LPC happen in 2020.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick, lemonldap-ng, and zeromq3), Fedora (ark, cryptsetup, gnutls, kernel, kernel-headers, and kernel-tools), openSUSE (firefox, kernel, and thunderbird), Red Hat (cloud-init, go-toolset:rhel8, libcroco, librepo, php:7.3, postgresql:10, and thunderbird), SUSE (firefox and go1.14), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.3, linux-aws-5.4, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-4.15, linux-gke-5.0, linux-gke-5.3, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oem, linux-oem-osp1, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-raspi2, linux-raspi2-5.3, linux-snapdragon and xorg-server, xorg-server-hwe-16.04, xorg-server-hwe-18.04).
One of the many unfortunate consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic was the cancellation of the 2020 GNU Tools Cauldron. That loss turned out to be a gain for the Linux Plumbers Conference, which was able to add a GNU Tools track to host many of the discussions that would have otherwise occurred at Cauldron. In that track, Ian Bearman presented his group's work using profile-guided optimization with the Linux kernel. This technique, which he often referred to as "pogo", is not straightforward to apply to the kernel, but the benefits would appear to justify the effort.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ark, netty, netty-3.9, qemu, squid3, and xorg-server), Fedora (chromium), Gentoo (dovecot and gnutls), Mageia (ansible, postgresql, and python-rsa), openSUSE (curl, freerdp, libX11, php7, squid, and xorg-x11-server), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (thunderbird), Slackware (gnutls), and SUSE (firefox, kernel, and thunderbird).
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for September 3, 2020 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
The 5.9-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So I certainly can't claim that things have calmed down, but hopefully this was pretty much it. Knock wood."
New to the forthcoming PHP 8.0 release is a feature called match expressions, which is a construct designed to address several shortcomings in PHP's switch statement. While it took three separate request-for-comment (RFC) proposals in order to be accepted, the new expression eventually received broad support for inclusion.
We left the saga of PEP 622 ("Structural Pattern Matching") at the end of June, but the discussion of a Python "match" statement—superficially similar to a C switch but with extra data-matching features—continued. At this point, the next steps are up to the Python steering council, which will determine the fate of the PEP. But there is lots of discussion to catch up on from the last two months or so.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that nominations are open, until October 28, for the Free Software Awards. Winners will be announced at the annual LibrePlanet conference. "You might know of a contributor or organization who has done significant and user-empowering work on free software. We invite you to take a moment to show them (and tell us) that you care, by nominating them for an award in one of three categories: the Award for the Advancement of Free Software, the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, or the Award for Outstanding New Free Software Contributor. Don't assume that someone else will nominate them -- too often, everyone assuming someone else will express the appreciation means that it never happens. As taking initiative and speaking up for the community are important parts of free software, why not take the time yourself to make sure your voice is heard?"
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