Brief items

Kernel release status

The current development kernel is 6.2-rc8, released on February 12. Linus said:

The 6.2 series continues to be fairly calm, and the only real reason for an rc8 is - as now mentioned several times - just to make up for some time during the holiday season. Not that we seem to really have needed it, but there was also no real reason to deviate from the plan. So here we are.

Stable updates: 6.1.11 and 5.15.93 were released on February 9, followed by 6.1.12 and 5.15.94 on February 14 and 5.10.168 on February 15.

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Linux kernel Podcast - season 2 episode 2

A new installment of the rejuvenated kernel podcast has been posted.

If there were a "theme of the moment" for the industry (other than layoffs), it would probably be Confidential Compute. It seems one can’t go more than 10 minutes without seeing a patch for some new confidential compute feature in one of the major architectures, or the system IP that goes along with it.

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Axboe: io_uring and networking in 2023

Jens Axboe has posted a detailed guide to improving the performance of networking applications with io_uring.

Network applications have been written with a readiness type of model for decades, most commonly using epoll(2) these days to get notified when a given socket has data available. While these applications can be adapted to io_uring by swapping epoll notifiers with io_uring notifiers, going down that path does not lead to an outcome that fully takes advantage of what io_uring offers. It’ll potentially provide a reduction of system calls compared to epoll, but will not be able to take advantage of some of the other features that io_uring offers. To do that, a change to the IO event loop must be done.

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Quote of the week

CAP_TRUST is being introduced to enable Linux security architects to ontologically differentiate processes that are allowed to modify security guarantees based on deontological (rule-based) predicates from processes allowed to modify security guarantees that are based on narratival (event-based) predicates.

More generally, but less accurately, it allows security architectures to be shaped by both Kantian and Hegelian logic perspectives.

— Greg Wettstein

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Realtime Ubuntu launched

Canonical has announced the general availability of a realtime variant of its distribution.

Based on the 5.15 version of the Linux kernel, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS integrates the out-of-tree PREEMPT_RT patches for x86 and Arm architectures. The PREEMPT_RT patchset reduces the kernel latencies as required by the most exacting workloads, helping to ensure time-predictable task execution. Meeting stringent determinism requirements and upper-bounding execution time, Ubuntu with PREEMPT_RT makes the kernel more preemptive than mainline Linux.

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Firefox 110.0 released

Version 110.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Significant new features include the ability to import bookmarks from the Opera and Vivaldi browsers and GPU sandboxing on Windows systems.

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A GCC COBOL status report

For those who have been anxiously awaiting the release of a GCC-based compiler for the COBOL language, James K. Lowden has a status report with some good news:

The GCC Cobol aspirant is now 16 months old, and pupating. If Cobol's 60-year history were an hour, gcobol is now one minute old.

When last we met our intrepid duo, gcobol had compiled 100 programs, perhaps 1000 lines of Cobol. Today we're pleased to announce a milestone: success with "nucleus" and "intrinsic function" modules of the NIST CCVS-85 test suite. [...]

We have, in other words, a verified, working Cobol-85 compiler.

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The future of Thunderbird

The Thunderbird email client blog has a plan for where the project is going.

Throughout the next 3 years, the Thunderbird project is aiming at these primary objectives:

• Make the code base leaner and more reliable, rewrite ancient code, remove technical debt.
• Rebuild the interface from scratch to create a consistent design system, as well as developing and maintaining an adaptable and extremely customizable user interface.
• Switch to a monthly release schedule.

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Development quotes of the week

We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.

— Jan Strehmel (via jwz)

Somewhere along the line, the free software world, particularly around larger projects, seems to have become convinced that bug triage is a good way to become involved in a project as a volunteer (maybe! true in some circumstances!), and separately has defined bug triage as closing old bugs (sort of! true if they no longer apply!). Neither of these are entirely unreasonable, or put another way both of these are true in specific situations. But they interact very poorly: people who don't know the project or the community very well are taught to tackle "bug triage" as their first project without good instructions, and naturally gravitate towards closing as many bugs as possible because this seems useful.

— Russ Allbery (Thanks to Paul Wise.)

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