Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 5.18-rc4, released on April 24. Linus said: "Fairly slow and calm week - which makes me just suspect that the other shoe will drop at some point. But maybe things are just going really well this release. It's bound to happen _occasionally_, after all."

Stable updates: 5.17.5, 5.15.36, 5.10.113, 5.4.191, 4.19.240, 4.14.277, and 4.9.312 were released on April 27.

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Täht: The state of fq_codel and sch_cake worldwide

Dave Täht has put together a summary of the state of fair queuing and the fight against bufferbloat in general.

On a very positive note, while it might seem the negatives are overwhelming in the list above, I’m confident that there are billions of devices for which fq_codel is doing a good job. I’m confident there is a rising tide of clued system administrators and users applying smart queue management in the right places at the right times. There’s more than enough products on the market already that have the right stuff in them to make better networks a matter of merely recognising the problem and applying the fix.

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Quotes of the week

Now is time to think what we should do. Should ntfs3 just be removed? As I really wanted to see that ntfs3 will be big thing I have to say that I vote for removing unless someone comes to rescue this catastrophe. Yes we break userspace, but we might break it silently if nobody is maintaining this.

— Kari Argillander

I think Linus said recently that Rust in the kernel is something that could fail, and he's right - but if it fails, it won't just be the failure of the Rust people to do the required work, it'll be _our_ failure too, a failure to work with them.

And I think the kernel needs Rust, in the long term. Rust is the biggest advance towards programming languages with embedded correctness proofs in the systems space since ever, and that's huge. It's only a first step, it doesn't solve everything - the next step will probably be dependent types (as in Idris); after that it's hard to say. But maybe 50, 100 years out, systems programming is going to look very different.

— Kent Overstreet

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Debian Project Leader Election 2022 Results

The Debian project leader election has completed and Jonathan Carter has been reelected for his third term. For more information, see the Debian vote page. We looked at the candidates back in March.

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Fedora not deprecating legacy BIOS - yet

As was recently reported here, the Fedora project has been considering dropping support for legacy BIOS systems in upcoming releases. The idea was controversial at best, and the minutes from the April 26 FESCo meeting show that it has been rejected, for now at least. The BIOS SIG will be asked for a new plan for BIOS support in Fedora.

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LineageOS 19 released

Version 19 of the Android-based LineageOS distribution has been released.

With that said, we have been working extremely hard since Android 12’s release last October to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to our hard work adapting to Google’s fairly large changes in Android 11, we were able to rebase our changes onto Android 12 much more efficiently. This led to a lot of time to spend on cool new features, as well as adapt our additions to Android 12’s new Material You design language!

Beyond the move to Android 12, this release includes improvements to a lot of apps, a new setup wizard, and more. Less happily, this release has had to leave a lot of older devices behind; a device must be able to run a 4.9 or newer kernel to be able to run LineageOS 19.

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OpenBSD 7.1 released

OpenBSD 7.1 has been released. The list of changes and new features is long, as usual; see the full text, below, for all the details.

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Two OpenWrt updates

The OpenWrt 21.02.3 and 19.07.10 updates have been released. These updates contain some security fixes and improved device support. It's noting that this is the last 19.07 update:

OpenWrt 19.07.10 is the final release of the 19.07 release branch, this branch is now end of life and we will not fix problems on this branch any more, not even severe security problems. We encourage all users still using OpenWrt 19.07 to upgrade to OpenWrt 21.02 or more recent OpenWrt versions.

Router distributions are easy to forget about; now might be a good time to check any relevant systems and, if needed, doing an upgrade.

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Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) released

The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release, codenamed "Jammy Jellyfish", is now available. It comes in several editions (Desktop, Server, Cloud, and Core) and multiple flavors (Ubuntu Budgie, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, UbuntuStudio, and Xubuntu). Lots more information can be found in the release notes.

Ubuntu Desktop 22.04 LTS gains significant usability, battery and performance improvements with GNOME 42. It features GNOME power profiles and streamlined workspace transitions alongside significant optimisations which can double the desktop frame rate on Intel and Raspberry Pi graphics drivers.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is the first LTS release where the entire recent Raspberry Pi device portfolio is supported, from the new Raspberry Pi Zero 2W to the Raspberry Pi 4. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS adds Rust for memory-safe systems-level programming. It also moves to OpenSSL v3, with new cryptographic algorithms for elevated security.

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Yocto Project 4.0 released

Version 4.0 of the Yocto Project distribution builder is out. Changes include a move to the 5.15 kernel, reproducibility fixes, improved overlayfs support, numerous security updates, and a long list of new recipes.

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