Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.16-rc6, released on July 13. It includes a fix for a somewhat scary regression that came up over the week; Linus said:

So I was flailing around blaming everybody and their pet hamster, because for a while it looked like a drm issue and then a netlink problem (it superficially coincided with separate issues with both of those subsystems).

But I did eventually figure out how to trigger it reliably and then it bisected nicely, and a couple of days have passed, and I'm feeling much better about the release again. We're back on track, and despite that little scare, I think we're in good shape.

Stable updates: 6.15.6, 6.12.37, 6.6.97, 6.1.144, and 5.15.187 were released on July 10, followed by 6.12.38, 6.6.98, 6.1.145, and 5.15.188 (containing a single fix for AMD CPUs) on July 14.

The 6.15.7, 6.12.39, 6.6.99, 6.1.146, 5.15.189, 5.10.240, and 5.4.296 updates are in the review process; they are due on July 17.

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Quotes of the week

When I was but a wee little bairn, my mother would always tell me "never merge briefly tested patches when you're at -rc6".

— Andrew Morton

So this is just a heads-up that I will *NOT* be taking any epoll patches AT ALL unless they are

(a) obvious bug fixes

(b) clearly separated into well-explained series with each individual patch simple and obvious.

[...]

Because long-term, epoll needs to die, or at least be seen as a legacy interface that should be cut down, not something to be improved upon.

— Linus Torvalds

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Parrot 6.4 released

Parrot is a Debian-based distribution with an emphasis on security improvement and tools; the 6.4 release is now available. "Many tools, like Metasploit, Sliver, Caido and Empire received important updates, the Linux kernel was updated to a more recent version, and the latest LTS version of Firefox was provided with all our privacy oriented patches.".

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Distributions quote of the week

On a personal note, I found this very meaningful: I was once told, "never meet your heroes." However, in the Unix community, by and large my heroes are wonderfully pleasant, generous, and kind people in real life, all of whom have either indirectly or directly had a profound influence on the course of my career and life.

— Dan Cross

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Hyprland 0.50.0 released

Version 0.50.0 of Hyprland, a compositor for Wayland, has been released. Changes include a new render-scheduling option that "can drastically improve FPS on underpowered devices, while coming at no performance or latency cost when the system is doing alright", an option to exclude applications from screen sharing, a new test suite, and more.

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Development quotes of the week

Okay, so if you don't have a mental model of a program, then maybe an LLM could improve your productivity. However, we agreed earlier that the main purpose of writing software is to build a mental model. If we outsource our work to the LLM are we still able to effectively build the mental model? I doubt it.

So should you avoid using these tools? Maybe. If you expect to work on a project long term, want to truly understand it, and wish to be empowered to make changes effectively then I think you should just write some code yourself. If on the other hand you are just slopping out slop at the slop factory, then install cursor4 and crack on - yolo.

— John Whiles

It's spelled s-f-r-a-m-e but it's pronounced DURBATULUK.

— jemarch

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The Software in the Public Interest 2024 annual report

Software in the Public Interest has released its annual report for 2024. It includes reports from the long list of projects housed under the SPI umbrella, but the financial statements are not included at this time.

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