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The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 27, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
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 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).
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.
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).
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
The linkerd 1.0 release is available. "Linkerd a service mesh for cloud native applications. As part of this release, we wanted to define what this actually meant." Support for per-service router configuration has been added, along with new plugin interfaces for policy control. (LWN looked at linkerd in early April).
The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 20, 2017 is available.
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition
InfoWorld plays with the Bash Bunny, a USB device for attacking computers. "It can run anything a regular Debian Linux distro can run, such as Python scripts or common Linux commands. To infiltrate other computing devices, Bash Bunny can fake its identity as a trusted media device, networking device, keyboard, or other serial device. For example, it can load itself as a keyboard device and mimic keystrokes. You can download dozens of existing payload scripts, create your own, or ask questions in a fairly active user forum."
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?
Security updates have been issued by Debian (activemq, libav, minicom, mysql-5.5, tiff3, and xen), Fedora (ansible, collectd, icu, and pcre), openSUSE (chromium and firefox), Red Hat (chromium-browser and kernel), Slackware (firefox), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux, linux-aws, linux-gke, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux, linux-raspi2, linux-hwe, linux-lts-trusty, linux-lts-xenial, qemu, and samba).
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.
If you're one of the few people still using FTP to access the Debian repositories, the time has come to move on: FTP service will be shut down at the beginning of November.
Every conference venue has problems with the mix of room sizes, but I don't recall ever going to a talk that so badly needed to be in a bigger room as Jessie Frazelle and Alex Mohr's talk at CloudNativeCon/KubeCon Europe 2017 on securing Kubernetes. The cause of the enthusiasm was the opportunity to get "best practice" information on securing Kubernetes, and how Kubernetes might be evolving to assist with this, directly from the source.
Collabora Office 5.3 has been released with all the fixes and several backported features from the upstream LibreOffice 5.3 release. "The biggest change in this release is the inclusion of a long list of new features, combined with many User Interface improvements, making Collabora Office more powerful and at the same time faster and more comfortable to work with."
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