Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.15-rc4, released on April 27. Linus said:

So let's see if this rc ends up avoiding any silly issues - things certainly look pretty normal, and there were no hurried last-minute changes this week due to system upgrades.

Stable Updates: 6.14.4, 6.12.25, 6.6.88, and 6.1.135 were released on April 25.

The 6.14.5, 6.12.26, 6.6.89, 6.1.136, 5.15.181, 5.10.237, and 5.4.293 updates are in the review process; they are due on May 1.

Comments (none posted)

Quote of the week

How the fsck did we go from zero hfs/hfsplus maintainers to three in a matter of days? I should threaten to remove more code. It's like tariffs for the kernel.

— Christian Brauner

Comments (1 posted)

Debian Project Leader Election 2025 results

The Debian Project Leader election results have been announced. Andreas Tille has been re-elected and will serve another term through April 2026. LWN looked at the election and candidates in early April.

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Signing key change for Kali Linux

The Kali Linux distribution has announced that software updates will soon start failing for all users:

This is not only you, this is for everyone, and this is entirely our fault. We lost access to the signing key of the repository, so we had to create a new one. At the same time, we froze the repository (you might have noticed that there was no update since Friday 18th), so nobody was impacted yet. But we're going to unfreeze the repository this week, and it's now signed with the new key.

The announcement includes instructions for how to recover from the problem.

Comments (18 posted)

OpenBSD 7.7 released

The OpenBSD 7.7 release is available. There is, as usual, a long list of changes; see the full changelog for lots of details.

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Distributions quote of the week

Maybe we've been ethical hypocrites all along about machine learning applications packaged in Debian, and the current LLM craze is a good opportunity to clean house and reaffirm a strict free software policy including training data. I'm rather sympathetic to that argument, frankly, just because the simplicity of the "source code for everything, no exceptions" position is comfortable in my brain. But we should be fairly sure about what we're agreeing to before making that decision.

— Russ Allbery

Comments (11 posted)

Barnes: Parallel ./configure

Tavian Barnes takes on the tedious process of waiting for configure scripts to run.

I paid good money for my 24 CPU cores, but ./configure can only manage to use 69% of one of them. As a result, this random project takes about 13.5× longer to configure the build than it does to actually do the build.

The purpose of a ./configure script is basically to run the compiler a bunch of times and check which runs succeeded. In this way it can test whether particular headers, functions, struct fields, etc. exist, which lets people write portable software. This is an embarrassingly parallel problem, but Autoconf can't parallelize it, and neither can CMake, neither can Meson, etc., etc.

(Thanks to Paul Wise).

Comments (42 posted)

Firefox 138.0 released

Version 138.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Changes include some profile-management improvements, the ability to get weather-related suggestions in the address bar (US only), and some security fixes.

Comments (3 posted)

GCC 15.1 released

Version 15.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection has been released. Changes include implementing the C23 dialect by default, a number of new C++26 features, experimental support for unsigned integers in Fortran, a new COBOL front end, and more. See the GCC 15 changes page for details.

Comments (12 posted)

Meson 1.8.0 released

Version 1.8.0 of the Meson build system has been released. Notable changes in this release include the ability to run rustdoc for Rust projects, support for the c2y and gnu2y compiler options, and a new argument (android_exe_type) that makes it possible to use the same meson.build file for Android and non-Android systems.

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Valgrind-3.25.0 is available

Version 3.25.0 of the Valgrind dynamic-analysis tool has been released. It has lots of new features, including initial support for RISC-V on Linux, handling zstd-compressed debug sections, integration of the Linux Test Project test suite, support for lots more Linux system calls, and more. It also has plenty of bug fixes, of course.

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The conclusion of the FSF board review

The Free Software Foundation has announced the completion of the review of its board of directors; the process resulted in the reconfirmation of all five sitting board members.

The review examined board members Ian Kelling, Geoffrey Knauth, Henry Poole, Richard Stallman, and Gerald Sussman. The process generated detailed philosophical and policy discussions between board members and the FSF's global associate members on topics ranging from the firmness of the Free Software Definition, developments in machine learning, to the board's president position.

Comments (33 posted)

OSI publishes election retrospective

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has quietly published "takeaways" from its internal retrospective on the recent board of directors election as an update to the March blog post that announced the new members of the board. The election was controversial, in part, due to poor communication and OSI changing the election rules and disqualifying several candidates after the election finished. LWN covered the election and results in March. The update commits to improvements in communication and candidate selection:

What this election exposed was the need for the organization to also assess whether candidates were fully eligible to run and prepared to be seated on the board before voting begins. This is something we will add to the election timeline next year. While we have not finished figuring out all of the requirements for that assessment, part of it will be asking candidates to sign a Candidate Agreement at nomination time. We also have some ideas on ways for potential candidates to have more information even before submitting a nomination.

In a related note, there is a petition asking OSI to publish the "complete, unaltered" results of the board of directors election. Thanks to Josh Triplett for the tip on the petition.

Comments (19 posted)

LWN's Mastodon migration

The LWN.net fediverse (Mastodon) feed has moved; we are now known as @LWN@lwn.net. The migration magic has shifted many of our followers over automatically but, if you follow that stream, you might want to make sure that you have shifted to the new source.

Comments (16 posted)

Albertson: Future of OSL in Jeopardy

Lance Albertson writes that the Oregon State University Open Source Lab, the home of many prominent free-software projects over the years, has run into financial trouble:

I am writing to inform you about a critical and time-sensitive situation facing the Open Source Lab. Over the past several years, we have been operating at a deficit due to a decline in corporate donations. While OSU's College of Engineering (CoE) has generously filled this gap, recent changes in university funding have led to a significant reduction in CoE's budget. As a result, our current funding model is no longer sustainable and CoE needs to find ways to cut programs.

Earlier this week, I was informed that unless we secure $250,000 in committed funds, the OSL will be forced to shut down later this year.

Comments (none posted)