Brief items
Security
Security quote of the fortnight
The story was meant to poke fun at the preposterous IoT hype of the day, and I recall thinking that creating a world of talking appliance was the height of Philip K Dickist absurdism. Little did I dream that a decade and a half later, the story would be even more relevant, thanks to AI pump-and-dumpers who sweatily jammed chatbots into kitchen appliances.— Cory Doctorow republishes The Brave Little Toaster
Kernel development
Kernel release status
The current development kernel is 6.13-rc6, released on January 5. Linus commented:
So we had a slight pickup in commits this last week, but as expected and hoped for, things were still pretty quiet. About twice as many commits as the holiday week, but that's still not all that many.I expect things will start becoming more normal now that people are back from the holidays and are starting to recover and wake up from their food comas.
Previously, 6.13-rc5 was released on December 29.
Stable updates: 6.12.7, 6.6.68, and 6.1.122 were released on December 27, followed by 6.12.8, 6.6.69, and 6.1.123 on January 2
The 6.12.9, 6.6.70, 6.1.124, 5.15.176, 5.10.233, and 5.4.289 updates are in the review process; they are due at any time.
Cook: Colliding with the SHA prefix of Linux's initial Git commit
Kees Cook describes his work resulting in a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the same first 12 characters as the initial commit in the kernel's repository.
This is not yet in the upstream Linux tree, for fear of breaking countless other tools out in the wild. But it can serve as a test commit for those that want to get this fixed ahead of any future collisions (or this commit actually landing).
LWN looked at commit-ID collisions a few weeks back.
Kicinski: netdev in 2024
Kernel networking maintainer Jakub Kicinski reviews progress in the networking subsystem in 2024.
Work on relieving the rtnl_lock pressure has continued throughout the year. The rtnl_lock is often mentioned as one of the biggest global locks in the kernel, as it protects all of the network configuration and state. The efforts can be divided into two broad categories – converting read operations to rely on RCU protection or other fine grained locking (v6.9, v6.10), and splitting the lock into per-network namespace locks (preparations for which started in v6.13).
Quote of the fortnight
I'd like to semi-formally announce that everything is finally in place for me to take a more official "Linux maintainer support" role at the Linux Foundation. I know we've talked about it multiple times before and I brought it up at several maintainer summits, but it took a while to officially mold it into something tangible. I would like to thank the Linux Foundation TAB for making this possible.— Konstantin RyabitsevIn terms of impact, it's more of what I've already been doing:
- working on maintainer tooling (b4, patchwork-bot, bugspray)
- writing maintainer and workflow documentation
- helping new maintainers get on board
- taking care of the maintainer keyring
The key difference will be that it's to become my primary focus as opposed to being done on a time-available basis with infrastructure tasks always taking priority.
Distributions
2024 in retrospect (Gentoo News)
Gentoo Linux has published a project retrospective that looks at the major improvements and news from 2024, the Gentoo Foundation's finances, and contributions to Gentoo by the numbers.
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has remained at an overall high level in 2024, with a 2.4% increase from 121000 to 123942. The number of commits by external contributors has grown strongly from 10708 to 12812, now across 421 unique external authors.
The importance of GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, as entry point for potential developers, is clearly increasing as well. We have had 7517 commits in 2024, a strong growth from 5045 in 2023. The number of contributors to GURU has increased a lot as well, from 158 in 2023 to 241 in 2024. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software.
LineageOS 22.1 released
Version 22.1 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution is out.
We've been hard at work since Android 15's release in September, adapting our unique features to this new version of Android. Android 15 introduced several complex changes under the hood, but due to our previous efforts adapting to Google's UI-centric adjustments in Android 12 through 14, we were able to rebase onto Android 15's code-base faster than anticipated.Additionally, this is far-and-away the easiest bringup cycle from a device perspective we have seen in years. This means that many more devices are ready on day one that we'd typically expect to have up this early in the cycle!
Last, but not least, we even had enough time and resources to introduce not one, but two new exciting apps! The first one, Twelve, will replace our aging music app, while the other one, Camelot, will let you view PDF files.
Announcing the pkgsrc-2024Q4 branch
The pkgsrc developers have announced the 2024Q4 branch of the pkgsrc cross-platform packaging system. It is the default package manager for NetBSD, SmartOS, and is available for Linux as well. This marks the 85th quarterly release of pkgsrc:
Since the pkgsrc-2024Q3 release, 110 packages were added, 1580 packages were updated (with 2399 updates, including language-specific updates: 24 Go, 3 OCaml, 66 Perl, 5 PHP, 626 Python, 282 Ruby, 44 TeX). 33 packages were removed.
Mourning Steve Langasek
From the Ubuntu Discourse instance comes the sad news that longtime Debian and Ubuntu contributor Steve Langasek has passed away.
Steve passed away at the dawn of 2025. His time was short but remarkable. He will forever remain an inspiration. Judging by the outpouring of feelings this week, he is equally missed and mourned by colleagues and friends across the open source landscape, in particular in Ubuntu and Debian where he was a great mind, mentor and conscience.
Distributions quote of the fortnight
Please be careful in your efforts to make contributing easier to not alienate those who already contribute, sometimes for decades. Also: it's rather easy to kill motivation but very hard to revive it, once killed.
Development
Firefox 134.0 released
Version 134.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include support for touchpad hold gestures on Linux, a refreshed layout for the New Tab page for users in the US and Canada, and improved support for debugging web extensions.
An Algol 68 front end for GCC
While some people are focused on new and trendy languages, José Marchesi has, instead, gifted the world with a GCC front end for the Algol 68 language.
This WIP is a GCC front-end for Algol 68, the fascinating, generally poorly understood and often vilified programming language. It is common knowledge that Algol 68 was well ahead of its time back when it was introduced, and anyone who knows the language well will suspect this probably still holds true today, but more than fifty years after the publication of the Revised Report the world may finally be ready for it, or perhaps not, we shall see.
For those who see Algol 68 as too new, there was also a COBOL front end posted in December.
Ruby 3.4 released
Continuing its tradition of yearly major releases on December 25, the Ruby programming-language project has released Ruby 3.4.0 (followed quickly by 3.4.1, which simply updates the version number). Ruby 3.4 includes lots of changes, including the addition of it as a less-confusing shorthand for _1 as a block parameter, switching to Prism as the default parser, adding the Happy Eyeballs version 2 algorithm to the socket library, just-in-time (JIT) compiler (YJIT) improvements, garbage-collection modularization, and more.2024: Year in Review (Tor Blog)
The Tor Project has published a review of major milestones from 2024, including merging with the Tails project, work to enable human-friendly .onion addresses, and the launch of WebTunnel:
By mimicking common internet protocols, WebTunnel improves the resilience of the Tor network in regions with heavy censorship. And since its launch earlier this year, we've made sure to prioritize small download sizes for more convenient distribution and simplified the support of uTLS integration further mimicking the characteristics of more widespread browsers. This makes Webtunnel safe for general users because it helps conceal the fact that a tool like Tor is being used.
Development quotes of the fortnight
The FSF's focus on TPMs here is not only technically wrong, it's indicative of a failure to understand what's actually happening in the industry. While the FSF has been focusing on TPMs, GPU vendors have quietly deployed all of this technology without the FSF complaining at all. Microsoft has enthusiastically participated in making hardware DRM on Windows possible, and user freedoms have suffered as a result, but Playready hardware-based DRM works just fine on hardware that doesn't have a TPM and will continue to do so.— Matthew Garrett
Around fifty years ago, SCCS introduced version control, demonstrated that it was both helpful and practical, and then within a dozen years or so was replaced by something better (CVS), which in turn was replaced, and so on right up until the present. Whatever is in use today will eventually be replaced, too.— SCSS creator Marc Rochkind looks back 50 years laterSCCS is both dead and alive. The software is mostly gone away, except for its presence in UNIX releases, IEEE standards, and obsolete software systems.
The ideas introduced by SCCS—controlling versions and recording the changes, who made them, when, and why—made a permanent change to the way software is developed. I’m happy to have contributed to that.
Page editor: Daroc Alden
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