Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.17-rc6, released on February 27. Linus said:

While things look reasonably normal, we _are_ getting pretty late in the release, and we still have a number of known regressions. They don't seem all that big and scary, but some of them were reported right after the rc1 release, so they are getting a bit long in the tooth. I'd hate to have to delay 5.17 just because of them, and I'm starting to be a bit worried here. I think all the affected maintainers know who they are.

Stable updates: 5.16.12, 5.15.26, 5.10.103, 5.4.182, 4.19.232, 4.14.269, and 4.9.304 were all released on March 2.

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Reiserfs going away in 2025

This proposed patch from Jan Kara tells the whole story:

Reiserfs is relatively old filesystem and its development has ceased quite some years ago. Linux distributions moved away from it towards other filesystems such as btrfs, xfs, or ext4. To reduce maintenance burden on cross filesystem changes (such as new mount API, iomap, folios ...) let's add a deprecation notice when the filesystem is mounted and schedule its removal to 2025.

This change has not yet been merged into the mainline, but there does not appear to be any real opposition to it.

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Quote of the week

In the kernel, we always program as if userspace is out to get us. If userspace can possibly do something to confuse the kernel, it will. It might be malicious or incompetent, but it will happen.

— Dave Hansen

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Armbian 22.02 has been released

The Armbian project, which is a Debian-based distribution for Arm-based single-board computers (SBCs) and development boards, has a lengthy release announcement for Armbian 22.02. Beyond lots of updates and bug fixes (of course), Armbian has added support for Debian unstable ("sid"), Raspberry Pi images, a new Extensions build framework, build automation (continuous integration and continuous deployment) improvements, and more. There is also upcoming support for Ubuntu 22.04 images.

Historically, in many cases board manufacturers have been ‘maintaining’ (in parallel) some heavily patched Linux kernel which have diverged so far from mainline as to be considered an entirely different operating system. That mess, is what some refer to as a Board Support Package (BSP), ‘legacy’ kernel, or ‘vendor’ bootloader.

Those sources get ‘thrown over the wall’ upon release, very often never to be touched again. They are full of proprietary code (binary blobs), dirty hacks, ancient kernels, and all manner of other garbage that will never see the light of day in mainline Linux. All of which is very similar to the situation on Android, if you know anything about that.

In fact, if not for projects like Armbian, our SBCs would likewise become throwaway devices, too — just like your Android — in pretty short order. That is, if you ever even got them to work in the first place.

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OpenWrt 21.02.2 and 19.07.9 released

Versions 21.02.2 and 19.07.9 of the OpenWrt router distribution are available. Both releases include a number of security fixes. Additionally, 21.02.2 adds support for a set of new devices, adds a new rpcapd package, and includes various other enhancements.

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Rust compiler ambitions for 2022 (Inside Rust)

The Inside Rust Blog has posted the Rust compiler team's goals for this year in the hope of encouraging others to help.

In theory, any unsoundness issue potentially undermines Rust's promise of reliability. We want, by the end of this year, to have a clear understanding of how each of those I-unsound issues came to be. We are looking into systematically detecting such issues and whether we can deploy mitigations or fixes for entire classes of issues, instead of addressing them on a case by case basis.

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Rust 1.59.0 released

Version 1.59.0 of the Rust language has been released. There are a number of new features, including support for inline assembly (in unsafe blocks, naturally), the ability to use tuples and slices on the left-hand side of an assignment, const generic defaults, and more. Incremental compilation is also disabled by default in this release to work around a known bug.

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Development quote of the week

C with #ifdefs is not portable, it is a collection of 2^n overlaid programs, where n is the number of distinct #if[n]def tags. It's too bad the problems of that approach were not appreciated by the C standard committee, who mandated the #ifndef guard approach that I'm sure could count as a provable billion dollar mistake, probably much more. The cost of building #ifdef'ed code, especially with C++, which decided to be more fine-grained about it, is unfathomable.

— Rob Pike

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Developments in the FOSS response to Copilot and related technologies

Back in July, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) put out a call for white papers to explore the issues around GitHub's Copilot AI-assisted programming tool, especially with regard to copyleft licensing; each selected white paper was awarded $500. The FSF has now published five of the submissions that the organization thought "advanced discussion of important questions, and did so clearly".

In our call for papers, we set forth several areas of interest. Most of these areas centered around copyright law, questions of ownership for AI-generated code, and legal impacts for GitHub authors who use a GNU or other copyleft license(s) for their works. We are pleased to announce the community-provided research into these areas, and much more.

First, we want to thank everyone who participated by sending in their papers. We received a healthy response of twenty-two papers from members of the community. The papers weighed-in on the multiple areas of interest we had indicated in our announcement. Using an anonymous review process, we concluded there were five papers that would be best suited to inform the community and foster critical conversations to help guide our actions in the search for solutions.

One of the submissions published was from Policy Fellow at Software Freedom Conservancy, Bradley M. Kuhn; that organization has announced the formation of a committee to "develop recommendations and plans for a Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community response to the use of machine learning tools for code generation and authorship". A public ai-assist mailing list has been set up for discussions. "The inaugural members of the Committee are: Matthew Garrett, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bradley M. Kuhn, Heiki Lõhmus, Allison Randal, Karen M. Sandler, Slavina Stefanova, John Sullivan, David ‘Novalis’ Turner, and Stefano ‘Zack’ Zacchiroli."

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Zoë Kooyman is the new FSF executive director

The Free Software Foundation has announced that Zoë Kooyman will be the organization's new executive director.

Kooyman was appointed by the FSF board following a careful selection process that included a review by a FSF staff committee and evaluation criteria such as management, fundraising, business and finance, legal, and technical skills. She succeeds John Sullivan, who served as executive director for twelve years.

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