Brief items

Security quote of the week

The reason for their silence? Fear of mean tweets—many generated by bot networks. Fear of being primaried. Fear of the digital mob that Elon Musk can direct with a few keystrokes—a mob increasingly composed of artificial accounts and coordinated influence operations. These aren't just personal failures of courage—they represent something far more dangerous: the complete surrender of democratic institutions to manufactured technological intimidation.

Let's be clear about the historical magnitude of this choice: They're trading their eyewitness testimony of war crimes for social media comfort. They're choosing X followers—most of whom are probably bots tied to various influence operations, both foreign and domestic—over the international order that has prevented nuclear war for three generations.

The supreme irony is that the pressure they're surrendering to isn't even real. These senators are abandoning witnessed truth about war crimes in response to artificially generated outrage. They're choosing bot approval over bomb evidence. The digital mob they fear is largely synthetic—but the consequences of their cowardice will be catastrophically real.

— Mike Brock on the US Senate

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Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.14-rc4, released on February 23. Linus said: "This continues to be the right kind of 'boring' release: nothing in particular stands out in rc4".

Stable updates: 6.13.4, 6.12.16, 6.6.79, and 6.1.129 were released on February 21.

The 6.13.5, 6.12.17, and 6.6.80 updates are in the review process; they are due at any time.

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Linus on Rust and the kernel's DMA layer

At the end of January we ran this article on the discussions around a set of Rust bindings for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer. Many pixels have been expended on the topic since across the net, most recently in this sprawling email thread. Linus Torvalds has now made his feelings known on the topic:

You are not forced to take any Rust code, or care about any Rust code in the DMA code. You can ignore it.

But "ignore the Rust side" automatically also means that you don't have any *say* on the Rust side.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say "I want to have nothing to do with Rust", and then in the very next sentence say "And that means that the Rust code that I will ignore cannot use the C interfaces I maintain".

The code in question seems highly likely to be merged for the 6.15 release.

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A change in maintenance for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer

The conversation around the merging of a set of Rust abstractions for the kernel's DMA-mapping layer has mostly settled after Linus Torvalds made it clear that the code would be accepted. One other consequence of this decision, though, is that Christoph Hellwig has quietly stepped down from the maintenance of the DMA-mapping code. Marek Szyprowski will be the maintainer of that layer going forward. Hellwig has maintained that code for many years; his contributions will be missed.

Comments (96 posted)

Quotes of the week

For example, this merge window I did have that unusual "this doesn't work for my rust build" situation, but that one was caught and fixed before the merge window even closed. Guess what *wasn't* caught, and then wasn't fixed until -rc3? A bog-standard build error on the esoteric platform called "i386".

— Linus Torvalds

The difference between network and security developers is that a network developer thinks 10 microseconds is a long time, while a security developer thinks 10 years is no time at all.

— Casey Schaufler

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Armbian 25.2 released

Version 25.2 of the Armbian Linux distribution for single-board computers (SBCs) has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for many new SBCs, an upgrade to Linux kernel 6.12.x, and more. See the changelog for a complete list.

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Gentoo now offers qcow2 disk images

The Gentoo Linux project has announced the availability of qcow2 images for amd64 (x86_64) and arm64 (aarch64), and plans to "eventually" offer images for the riscv64 and loongarch64 architectures.

The images, updated weekly, include an EFI boot partition and a fully functional Gentoo installation; either with no network activated but a password-less root login on the console ("no root pw"), or with network activated, all accounts initially locked, but cloud-init running on boot ("cloud-init").

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Distributions quote of the week

To me, it's not about "fun" of swapping out bits of the distribution (trust me, fun it ain't). And it's not about shipping "longterm" stale kernels. It's about the fact that we have no resources to have the kernel package support the hardware people want to use Fedora on. From the Raspberry Pi 5 to the new RISC-V stuff, the "mainline-only" approach only works if there's folks supporting that effort with engineering resources. And we don't have that. As a concrete example, Fedora Mobility has struggled to figure out a reference device because of the lack of options in the mainline kernel.

Justin Forbes does great work maintaining the Fedora kernel, but he's the only one. In 2018, we had three kernel engineers. We briefly had four in 2019, but today, we're down to one. And because of the way the kernel package is maintained (with CKI and secure boot and such), it seems like only Red Hatters are able to maintain that package. So where's the community opportunity to enable the things that they want to use Fedora on? So far, it seems by creating custom kernel builds in COPR for remixes.

This is a point where I feel we have some misalignment of interests. I think it's fair to say we *want* to remain tracking mainline and there are a lot of benefits to doing so. But we're sacrificing a lot for it, including first-mover advantage and opportunities that follow from that.

— Neal Gompa

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Aqualung 2.0 released

Version 2.0 of the Aqualung gapless music player has been released. Aqualung supports playback of a wide range of audio formats, ripping CDs to WAV, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, or MP3, and subscribing to podcasts via RSS or Atom feeds. The primary change in this release is the migration from GTK2 to GTK3, and dropping support for custom skins as a result.

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Emacs 30.1 released

The Emacs extensible text editor (among other things) has made a security release to address two vulnerabilities. Emacs 30.1 has fixes for CVE-2025-1244, which is a shell-command-injection flaw in the man.el man page browser and for CVE-2024-53920, which is a code-execution vulnerability in the flymake syntax-checking mode. LWN covered the flymake problems back in December.

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Rust 1.85.0 released

Version 1.85.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes in the release include support for async closures, some convenience iterators for tuples, and a number of stabilized APIs. The headline feature, though, is that this release stabilizes the Rust 2024 edition, described as "the largest edition we have released". The 2024 edition guide has a detailed listing of all the changes that were incorporated this time around.

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