Brief items

OpenSSH 9.1 released

OpenSSH 9.1 has been released. It is advertised as a bug-fix release (and it addresses a few low-priority memory-safety bugs), but there's also a new option to set the minimum RSA key size for authentication, a few sftp extensions, and more.

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Kernel release status

The 6.0 kernel is out, released on October 2. Linus said:

So, as is hopefully clear to everybody, the major version number change is more about me running out of fingers and toes than it is about any big fundamental changes.

But of course there's a lot of various changes in 6.0 - we've got over 15k non-merge commits in there in total, after all, and as such 6.0 is one of the bigger releases at least in numbers of commits in a while.

Headline features in 6.0 include a number of io_uring improvements including support for buffered writes to XFS filesystems and zero-copy network transmission, an io_uring-based block driver mechanism, the runtime verification subsystem, and much more; see the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more information.

Stable updates: 5.19.13 was released on October 4 with an important graphics driver fix. One day later, 5.19.14, 5.15.72, 5.10.147, 5.4.216, and 4.19.261 arrived with the usual collection of fixes.

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Quotes of the week

Email is a massively distributed software fuzzing project that lets you transmit messages in the sideband.

— Jani Nikula

There's a lot of weird debate about whether Rust in the kernel is useful or not... in my experience, it's way more useful than I could've ever imagined!

I went from 1st render to a stable desktop that can run run games, browsers, etc. in about two days of work on my driver.

— Asahi Lina

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Debian's firmware vote results

The results are in on the Debian project's general-resolution vote regarding non-free firmware in the installer image. The winning option allows the installer image to include firmware necessary to use the system:

We will include non-free firmware packages from the "non-free-firmware" section of the Debian archive on our official media (installer images and live images). The included firmware binaries will normally be enabled by default where the system determines that they are required, but where possible we will include ways for users to disable this at boot (boot menu option, kernel command line etc.).

The vote also changes the Debian Social Contract to make it clear that including non-free firmware in this manner is allowed.

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Git 2.38 released

Version 2.38.0 of the Git distributed version-control system has been released. It comes with lots of new features and bug fixes, some of the former are described in a GitHub blog post by Taylor Blau. Highlights include the promotion of the scalar addition for large repositories into Git core, improvements to multi-branch rebase operations with --update-refs, performance improvements, a bash prompt indication for unmerged indexes, and lots more.

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Ekstrand: Introducing NVK

Jason Ekstrand announces a new Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware on the Collabora blog. It seems to be off to a good start, but there is some work yet to do:

Normally, I would have submitted the merge request long ago. There are far more alpha-quality drivers already in Mesa. The problem is that we really need a new kernel uAPI to support Vulkan properly and I don't want to be stuck supporting the current nouveau uAPI for the next five years.

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Al-Qudsi: Implementing truly safe semaphores in rust

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi provides extensive details on what it takes to implement a safe semaphore type in the Rust language.

The problem is that with n > 1, there’s no concept of a “privileged” owning thread and all threads that have “obtained” the semaphore do so equally. Therefore, a rust semaphore can only ever provide read-only (&T) access to an underlying resource, limiting the usefulness of such a semaphore almost to the point of having no utility. As such, the only safe “owning” semaphore with read-write access that can exist in the rust world would be Semaphore<()>, or one that actually owns no data and can only be used for its side effect of limiting concurrency while the semaphore is “owned,” so to speak.

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Weston 11.0: what's new, what's next (Collabora blog)

Over on the Collabora blog, Marius Vlad writes about the recent Weston 11.0.0 release. Weston is the reference compositor for the Wayland display server protocol. Vlad looks at features of the release, including some things that are being deprecated and removed, as well as features coming in Weston 12.

Color management infrastructure code has landed that allows HDR [high dynamic range] characteristics to be delivered to an HDR-capable monitor by setting-up HDR metadata in a weston.ini configuration file and delivering that to KMS [kernel mode setting]. Once Weston gains the ability to produce HDR content in a future version, it will come naturally supported.

This new version brings in multiple RDP [remote desktop protocol] improvements, like clipboard pasting, various keyboard language support, bumped support for a newer version of FreeRDP library, and many more other improvements and fixes.

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The Thorny Problem of Keeping the Internet’s Time (New Yorker)

The New Yorker has a lengthy article on the Network Time Protocol and its creator David Mills.

Coders sometimes joke, morbidly, about the “bus factor.” How many people need to get hit by a bus before a given project is endangered? It’s difficult to determine the bus factor for N.T.P., and time synchronization more broadly, especially now that companies such as Google have developed their own N.T.P.-inspired proprietary code. But it seems reasonable to say that N.T.P.’s bus factor is rather small.

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