Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.16-rc8, released on January 2. "Please, as you emerge from your holiday-induced food coma, do give it a quick test so that we can all be happy about the final release next weekend".

Previously, 5.16-rc7 was released on December 26.

Stable updates: 5.15.12, 5.10.89, 5.4.169, 4.19.223, 4.14.260, 4.9.295, and 4.4.297 were released on December 29, followed by 5.15.13, 5.10.90, 5.4.170, 4.19.224, 4.14.261, 4.9.296, and 4.4.298 on January 5.

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The fast kernel headers tree

Kernel developer Ingo Molnar has been quiet for a while; now we know why. He has just announced a massive set of patches (touching over half of the files in the kernel tree) reworking how header files are handled.

The fast-headers tree offers a +50-80% improvement in absolute kernel build performance on supported architectures, depending on the config. This is a major step forward in terms of Linux kernel build efficiency & performance.

A justified question would be: why on Earth 2,200 commits??

It seems likely that interesting conversations will follow; stay tuned.

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Quotes of the week

And no, we don't add "benchmark tuning Kconfig questions" to the kernel. We leave those kinds of games to companies that need to fake their benchmark numbers.

— Linus Torvalds

The Linux kernel has X.509 processing inside it.

We're all going to die.

— Peter Gutmann

It could be worse. Your CPU could have a hidden x.509 processing code *and* a web server, that isn't getting regular security patches, and was probably written by firmware engineers.

Oh, wait....

— Ted Ts'o

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Gentoo Linux 2021 retrospective

The Gentoo Linux project looks back at 2021.

The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has once more clearly grown in 2021, from 104507 to 126920, i.e., by 21%. While the number of commits by external contributors, 11775, has remained roughly constant, this number now distributes across 435 unique external authors compared to 391 last year.

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Distribution quotes of the week

To be clear, you absolutely can still run your own email infrastructure, getting email delivered to you, filtering incoming spam, sending email (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices), providing IMAP access, and even run your own webmail setup. You can even do this with all open source software. But the email environment you get this way is increasingly what I called an artisanal one. It's cute, decent enough, and hand-crafted, but it doesn't measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers.

— Chris Siebenmann

Sometimes the Unix community suffers from the twin attitudes of a) believing if it can't be done perfectly, any improvement shouldn't be attempted at all and b) it's already done as well as is possible anyway.

I disagree with both of these positions, obviously, but have given up pushing against them.

We're in the 6th decade of Unix and we still suffer from unintended, fixable consequences of decisions made long long ago.

— Rob Pike

I believe if you are maintainer of an important package with many reverse dependencies, you should spend more time to avoid breakage because you have a huge lever effect. For instance, if you can cut corners to save 10 hours of work, but 100 other DDs [Debian Developers] will need to spend 30 minutes each to fix the breakage as a result, it is still a bad tradeoff.

OTOH, as a maintainer of an unpopular leaf package, I can get away with atrocious uploads because nobody but me will notice or care.

— Timo Röhling (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

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Darktable 3.8.0 released

Version 3.8.0 of the Darktable photo-processing application has been released. Significant changes include a new keyboard shortcut system, a new diffuse-or-sharpen module, a new "scene-referred" blurs module "to synthesize motion and lens blurs in a parametric and physically accurate way", support for the Canon CR3 raw format, and more.

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GIMP 2021 annual report

The GIMP project has put out a report summarizing a year of development on this image-manipulation application.

With 4 development versions released already, you know that we are working very hard on the future: GIMP 3.0.

Some features took a lot of time, mostly when we changed core logics. I am thinking in particular about the code for multi-selection of layers. It’s not that selecting multiple items in a list is hard to implement, it’s that any feature in the whole application has been forever expecting just one layer or one channel selected. So what happens when there are 2, 3 or any number of items selected? Every feature, every tool, every plug-in and filter has to be rethought for this new use case.

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Jami "Taranis" released

The Jami communication tool has released a major new stable version called "Taranis"; the blog post announcement explains: "Taranis, the Gallic and Celtic god of the sky, lightning and thunder, will be the baptismal name of this new version of Jami." The mailing-list announcement describes the tool this way:

Jami is a GNU package for universal communication that respects the freedom and privacy of its users. Jami is an end-to-end encrypted secure and distributed voice, video, and chat communication platform that requires no central server, and leaves the power of privacy and freedom in the hands of users.

Another recent blog post gives an overview of Jami for video conferences. The new release has improvements throughout the system, including the first phase of Swarm support, which are "fully distributed, peer-to-peer chats with conversation histories synchronized across your devices, and the potential to be expanded into group chats in upcoming future releases of Jami".

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Koch: A New Future for GnuPG

Longtime GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch has posted an update on the project, mostly focused on the new associated "GnuPG VS-Desktop" business that is, it seems, going quite well:

For many years our work was mainly financed by donations and smaller projects. Now we have reached a point where we can benefit from a continuous revenue stream to maintain and extend the software without asking for donations or grants. This is quite a new experience to us and I am actually a bit proud to lead one of the few self-sustaining free software projects who had not to sacrifice the goals of the movement.

He concludes with a request for individuals who have been donating to GnuPG to redirect their generosity toward another deserving project. This is good news; GnuPG ran on a shoestring for far too long.

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Krita 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of the Krita painting program has been released. "This is a huge release, with a lot of new features and improvements". Changes include a reworked resource system, dithered gradients, faster color management, a reworked animation subsystem, and more; see the release notes for details.

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GNOME libadwaita 1.0 released

Version 1.0 of the GNOME libadwaita library is out; this will be of interest to GNOME application developers. "Libadwaita is a library implementing the GNOME HIG, complementing GTK. For GTK 3 this role has increasingly been played by Libhandy, and so Libadwaita is a direct Libhandy successor."

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NumPy 1.22.0 has been released

Version 1.22.0 of the NumPy scientific computing module is out. "NumPy 1.22.0 is a big release featuring the work of 153 contributors spread over 609 pull requests. There have been many improvements". Those improvements include the "essentially complete" annotation of the main namespace, a preliminary version of the proposed Array API, and more.

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Systemd 250 released

Systemd 250 has been released. To say that the list of new features is long would be a severe understatement; the developers have clearly been busy.

systemd-homed now makes use of UID mapped mounts for the home areas. If the kernel and used file system support it, files are now internally owned by the "nobody" user (i.e. the user typically used for indicating "this ownership is not mapped"), and dynamically mapped to the UID used locally on the system via the UID mapping mount logic of recent kernels. This makes migrating home areas between different systems cheaper because recursively chown()ing file system trees is no longer necessary.

(See this article for a description of ID-mapped mounts).

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Development quote of the week

If you accept this premise that there is no tragedy of the commons – that open source software cannot be over-grazed by having more people use it – that freeloaders are free, and scarcity is not an applicable concept, then you’re forced to look skeptically at other assumptions we’ve been starting to make lately in the broader open source community.

Like the idea that open source software just isn’t “sustainable”. That unless we somehow find a new way to force users to “give back” (i.e. pay/donate!), we’re going to burn out people who donate their “free labor”, but won’t do so forever.

In essence, that we’re at the cusp of a Malthusian-Randesque crisis! Too many takers, too few and too poorly compensated makers!

Never mind the fact that actual, observed famines are so rare that everyone keeps using the same example when it comes to this debate: OpenSSL! A famine that was promptly alleviated as soon as its effects were apparent.

— David Heinemeier Hansson

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