Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.0-rc5, released on September 11. Linus said: "Nothing looks particularly scary, so jump right in".

Stable updates: 5.19.8, 5.15.66, and 5.10.142 were released on September 8; 5.15.67 added a quick fix shortly thereafter.

The 5.19.9, 5.15.68, 5.10.143, 5.4.212, 4.19.257, 4.14.293, and 4.9.328 stable updates are all in the review process; they are due on September 15.

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Quote of the week

The big issue is that so few Linux kernel developers understand what the Linux security policy is. So much emphasis has gone into "least privilege" and "fine granularity" that it is rare to find someone who is willing to think about the big picture.

— Casey Schaufler

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Unicode 15 released

Version 15 of the Unicode standard has been released.

This version adds 4,489 characters, bringing the total to 149,186 characters. These additions include two new scripts, for a total of 161 scripts, along with 20 new emoji characters, and 4,193 CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) ideographs.

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Scaling Git’s garbage collection (GitHub blog)

The GitHub blog has a detailed look at garbage collection in Git and the work that has been done to make it faster.

To solve this problem, we turned to a long-discussed idea on the Git mailing list: cruft packs. The idea is simple: store an auxiliary list of mtime data alongside a pack containing just unreachable objects. To garbage collect a repository, Git places the unreachable objects in a pack. That pack is designated as a “cruft pack” because Git also writes the mtime data corresponding to each object in a separate file alongside that pack. This makes it possible to update the mtime of a single unreachable object without changing the mtimes of any other unreachable object.

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