Brief items

Kernel release status

The 6.13 kernel is out, released on January 19. As Linus put it: "So nothing horrible or unexpected happened last week, so I've tagged and pushed out the final 6.13 release."

Significant features in this release include the lazy preemption model for CPU scheduling, Arm64 Guarded Control Stack support, the PIDFD_GET_INFO() operation, multi-grain file timestamps, beginning atomic write support for the ext4 and XFS filesystems, the setxattrat(), getxattrat(), listxattrat(), and removexattrat() system calls, private stacks for BPF programs, a new mechanism for adding guard pages to a memory mapping, the removal of the reiserfs filesystem, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 6.13 page for more information.

Stable updates: 6.12.10, 6.6.72, and 6.1.125 were released on January 17, followed by 6.1.126 on January 19 and 6.6.73 on January 21.

The 6.12.11, 6.6.74, 6.1.127, and 5.15.177 updates are in the review process; they are due on January 23.

Comments (none posted)

Quote of the week

By my math linux-next material queued at the time of the start of the merge window is around 21% lighter for 6.14 than it was for 6.13. Given that the release cycle is 9 weeks long, a 21% drop translates to roughly 2 weeks of vacation time. A disturbingly sane amount of vacation time to take at the end of the year :)

— Jakub Kicinski

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Zero-trust builds for FreeBSD

The FreeBSD Foundation has announced that it has undertaken a project to deliver zero-trust builds commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA).

The Zero-Trust Build project is scheduled from Jan-Aug 2025 and centers on the FreeBSD build process, and in particular, release building. The primary goal of this work is to enable the entire release process to run without requiring root access, and that build artifacts build reproducibly – that is, that a third party can build bit-for-bit identical artifacts.

Additionally, the project aims to enhance build process documentation, ensuring that release building is straightforward and does not require specialized knowledge. The work is targeted for completion prior to the release of FreeBSD 15.0.

The Foundation says that updates should not impact users of FreeBSD release images, but it may have an impact on developers basing projects or products on FreeBSD that make modifications to its release process.

Comments (6 posted)

Distributions quote of the week

The Debian project's goal is not to make Rust folks happy, rather it is to make Debian users happy. Perhaps the way they packaged Rust was the best that they could do under the constraints (which are enormous, given the existing infrastructure, user base, and cultural expectations)? I would personally show some humility when criticizing a project like Debian which stood the test of time like very few other open source projects.

— Boris Kolpackov

Comments (64 posted)

Dillo 3.2.0 released

Version 3.2.0 of the Dillo web browser has been released about a month after its 25th anniversary. Notable new features in 3.2.0 include SVG support for math formulas, optional support for WebP images, and more.

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GDB 16.1 released

Version 16.1 of the GDB debugger is out. There are a lot of changes, including watchpoints for tagged data pointers, a new script to print the stack trace of a running process, better Intel Processor Trace support, and more.

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Puppet fork OpenVox makes first release

The Vox Pupuli project has announced the first release of OpenVox, a "soft-fork" of the Puppet automation framework. The intention to fork was announced in December 2024.

OpenVox 8.11 is functionally equivalent to Puppet and should be a drop-in replacement. Be aware, of course, that even though you can type the same commands, use all the same modules and extensions, and configure the same settings, OpenVox is not yet tested to the same standard that Puppet is. [...]

Please don't use these packages on critical production infrastructures yet, unless you're comfortable with troubleshooting and reporting back on the silly errors we've made while rebranding and rebuilding.

Comments (18 posted)

Wine 10.0 released

Version 10.0 of the Wine Windows compatibility layer is out. "This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes". Those changes include full support for the Arm64EC architecture, better high-DPI display support, Wayland enabled by default, and more.

Comments (5 posted)

Development quote of the week

Have you considered creating a limited company that doesn't own anything of value but looks as if it does, getting half a billion in VC money, donating it all to the Pixelfed Foundation, and then having the LLC declare bankruptcy?

— David Chisnall

Comments (2 posted)